Legal costs hit women seeking protection orders

By BRIDGET CARTER

She was hung upside down, kicked, sexually abused and humiliated by her partner of 20 years.

Seeking protection from him cost Kate (not her real name) $12,000.

Legal advice to take out a non-violence order cost $4000, and taking out a protection order when the law changed after 1995 cost another $4000.

Now, the 50-year-old North Shore woman has spent another $4000 to renew the order after her former partner tried to have it lifted.

Like Kate, who walked out of her home with three children and took on a $470,000 mortgage, more than 2000 victims of domestic violence had to find money to pay legal bills for their protection orders last year because their disposable income or assets exceeded the $2000 that qualifies for legal aid.

Women's Refuge national co-ordinator Roma Balzer blames legal costs for a decline in the number of women seeking protection.

Last year, 5758 people applied for protection orders - nearly 2000 fewer than in 1996, when the orders first came into effect.

The orders are being investigated by the Ministry of Justice as part of its review of the Domestic Violence Act.

Protection orders are free, but the legal advice, particularly for writing an affidavit to file in court to get a protection order, is expensive.

One lawyer said the basic legal advice to seek protection cost $1000. But the cost could be much greater if a partner challenged the order.

A protection order has the power to stop someone who is violent from associating with his partner and children unless he gets permission.

Courts usually grant a victim's application for an order immediately. Their partners have three months to challenge the order.

Roma Balzer said one woman paid $36,000 in legal fees to keep herself and her children safe from her partner.

Another had paid $10,000, she said.

"The legal process can be very punishing," she said. "Some of them lose everything."

The system could be particularly brutal to white, middle-class women because white, middle-class men had the money to challenge protection orders and were likely to do so.

"That group have a particularly hard time if partners choose to contest it in the court," Roma Balzer said.

"If the guy does choose to contest it, she has hell to pay."

Kate said that although she had a good job, she thought about the costs for protection before leaving home.

"In some ways, the physical stuff is the least of it," she said. "I didn't have the money to chuck around, but he was doing my head in."

Senior Sergeant Dave Ryan, the family violence and community partnerships manager for the Waitakere-North Shore-Rodney police district, said that because of the cost, a number of people who could do with protection orders did not have them.

"A lot of people are living in silence," he said

Act MP Muriel Newman does not think women should pay for a protection order, but believes the burden of proof over whether an order is needed should be high.