Published on
By Anna Sago
When Mizzou Law professor Rachel Wechsler sat down to write her latest article about how COVID-19 re-shaped access to protective orders for survivors of intimate partner violence, her first priority was to understand the facts on the ground.
“In figuring out how to address intimate partner violence and how to best support people who experience it, there’s no perspective that is as valuable as that of the victims and survivors themselves,” she said. “That’s my view.”
The resulting research, Intimate Partner Violence: Access to Protection Beyond the Pandemic, which appeared in the second-most recent issue of the Boston College Law Review, highlights how courts changed the ways survivors can access orders of protection, or court orders that aim to stop the abuse, in response to COVID-19.
“One of the goals was to really look at the way the processes changed from before the pandemic to during the pandemic, and then in the late stages when public health restrictions were relaxed, … and to try to glean lessons from these procedural changes and their impact on accessibility,” she said.
During the period, many jurisdictions experimented with all-virtual and hybrid models, allowing victims to appear either over the phone, a video call or in-person. That flexibility is critical, Wechsler said, as it allows survivors greater access to justice.
Take, for instance, a victim who is being stalked, Wechsler explained. That person may not be able to go to the courthouse physically because their movements are being tracked. But appearing over the phone may allow them to get help without sacrificing their safety.
“There are various barriers to people’s access to civil orders of protection, access to legal processes in courthouses,” she said. “These barriers can be lowered by making a variety of procedures available, or they can be raised by having a lack of flexibility.”
Through surveys with survivors, Wechsler discovered that they expressed a diverse range of views as to their preferred way of participating in hearings, underscoring the need for jurisdictions to implement flexible processes for survivors to obtain protection orders.
Wechsler intentionally included a variety of quotes from survey participants in the published article, which she hopes will elevate their perspectives.
“I did my best to provide a platform for the survivors that participated in my study and their voices, and I hope that it was effective,” she said. “Elevating their voices and learning from their lived experiences were my goals and form the core of the study.”