Alone in court, with no lawyer or advocate, Ashley called her ex-husband to the stand to question him about the pain he inflicted on her. She had to prove he was not a safe person.
Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of domestic violence. If you are experiencing violence and need help, go to www.thehotline.org, call (800) 799-7233 or text "start" to 88788.
Ashley already had a temporary restraining order granted. She had been without an attorney for that court hearing, too. But he violated the order when he broke into her home. He was arrested but immediately released. Now he was questioning the restraining order and challenging her for custody of their daughter.
His mother paid for a good attorney, someone Ashley's former mother-in-law went to school with, and his whole family was in the courtroom supporting him despite witnessing the abuse, she said.
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"I was shaking," said Ashley, 36. "I had practiced and I had thought of questions ahead of time, but his lawyer kept objecting to everything I said. It was awful. It was really awful."
Forcing survivors to litigate their restraining order hearings is a regular reality -- and a gaping fault in a system that continues to fail battered women, advocates say. The lack of assistance particularly impacts women who are financially unstable, unable to afford an attorney and often on the brink of homelessness.
While initially Ashley moved into her own home when she fled her abuser, she soon experienced homelessness, bouncing between her parents' and friends' couches. Eventually, she stayed at three different domestic violence shelters in the years to come after a second violent relationship pushed her to the brink once again -- often, domestic violence victims who haven't accessed mental health care, which is hard to come by, are stuck in a cycle of abuse until they can heal from a lifetime of hurt. Research by Lee Enterprises shows that each additional violent experience causes more instability in their life, often pushing them deeper into housing instability.
Ashley said the legal system exacerbated her distress as she attempted to represent herself, seeking relief from her abuser and to maintain custody of her daughter, all while being judged for the challenges of homelessness caused, in large part, by the intimate partner violence she experienced.
How we did it: Data on domestic violence and housing
The Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team surveyed 150 women from July through October 2024 across eleven women's daytime and overnight shelters throughout the Pacific Northwest.
The Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team surveyed 150 women at daytime and overnight homeless shelters across the Pacific Northwest about the connection between domestic violence and homelessness. The surveys were conducted at women's shelters in Salem, Oregon, about 25 miles north of Albany and Corvallis, as well as nine other shelters located throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 2024, Oregon ranked fourth in the nation for the rate of people experiencing homelessness per 10,000 people, and it had the sixth-highest rate of female homelessness in the country, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
In this report, Lee Enterprises omits full names of domestic violence victims to protect their safety and identity.
Most of the women surveyed -- 72% -- had to represent themselves in court when seeking a restraining order against their alleged abusers while their abusers either had court-appointed attorneys or hired their own. Ashley was one of those women.
Only 2% of women surveyed paid for an attorney while the other 26% secured a coveted pro bono lawyer.
"I have seen people go through many hoops to get an order," said Shaykeishya Hardin, programs manager at Portland nonprofit Raphael House, a domestic violence shelter. "And after all that, the restraining order is often not enforced or it takes so much time for police to show up that it doesn't do anything to protect them. We've had clients who had to wait five hours or longer."
Fighting for her life
Within six months of leaving her husband and obtaining a restraining order, Ashley was jolted awake by a man on top of her punching her in the face. Her 2-year-old daughter lay next to her on their mattress on the floor. After fleeing violence, she had only bare necessities.
While she slept, her ex-husband punched through a side door window to unlock the handle, she said. Ashley's brother slept on the couch, staying to ensure she was safe from her fears. In the depths of that bitter December night, he sprang up from sleep to dial 911 as he heard Ashley scream.
"(My ex-husband) was only charged with criminal mischief," Ashley recalled about the incident. "He didn't receive any domestic violence charges, breaking or entering, or violating the restraining order. He told police I had invited him over."
The next morning, Ashley packed baby clothes into a suitcase and flew to California to temporarily leave her daughter with her mom and flew back to Portland the same day.
"That's when I filed for divorce," she said. "If he was going to try to kill me, I was going to make sure my daughter wasn't going to be there to suffer the same fate."
Melissa Erlbaum, director of Clackamas Women's Services in Oregon, said restraining orders can be complicated for many reasons. A victim's new housing can feel equally unsafe as the home they left if the victim feels the order isn't being enforced. While in some cases, there is an actual lack of effort to enforce an order, more often complications arise if the enforcement doesn't deter the behavior or if the public safety system lacks resources to find the abuser and find adequate evidence of a violation.
"Our society is heavily reliant on protective orders as the solution," Erlbaum said. "While it can be a tool, it is not an absolute, and in some cases, not an available or viable option."
Restraining orders can be particularly challenging for women experiencing homelessness who don't have locking doors or who may need to move locations continuously.
"They may move into a safe place, but the abuser finds them," Erlbaum said. "So we need to move them again. Housing vouchers can transfer to new placements, but it can be complicated when working with landlords, funders and finding new available apartments."
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Eventually, Ashley left her new home to stay with her father and stepmother in Southern Oregon to be far away from her abuser.
While Ashley didn't have a lawyer or advocate for the restraining order, she was paired with a pro bono attorney through Legal Aid Services of Oregon for her divorce proceedings. Often, the easiest domestic violence-related legal aid offered is for mothers seeking to divorce an abusive partner, she said.
"That's when things shifted," she said. "It was like night and day. I had a really good lawyer who went up against his awful, mean lawyer. His lawyer even called me a whore once when he walked past me in court one day."
But it's the many challenges to obtaining restraining orders and custody battles that precede and follow divorce hearings that are particularly acute for women experiencing financial hardship.
Erlbaum's organization in the suburbs and rural outlays of Portland piloted an unique legal program that pairs recently graduated law students or other people returning to the legal workforce with victims to do pro bono work. In exchange, Erlbaum's nonprofit helps those workers with the costs to start their own law practices.
While Erlbaum hopes to eventually offer full legal representation, currently the nonprofit only has the capacity to address protective issues.
"We find that restraining orders are dismissed so frequently, and survivors are rarely able to secure representation in legal proceedings for contested orders, we want to focus our efforts on those hearings because the burden of proof is fairly high," Erlbaum said. "The survivor is in the courtroom with their abuser being asked to explain why their safety is at risk. It is a high bar for survivors to overcome."
Because abuse so often happens behind closed doors and victims many times do not call police, submit a police report or agree to drop charges when their abuser asks, there is often a lack of evidence. Erlbaum's legal aid workers help victims overcome those barriers.
Despite the divorce and initial custody win, Ashley's legal battle was far from done. Her ex-husband had no plans to stop and he challenged for custody, which legal aid often doesn't have capacity to help with.
In the years following her divorce, her ex-husband was often on probation for restraining order violations or for violence he incited against other women. He nearly killed another woman when he threw her down a set of stairs and broke her neck, which he was charged and arrested for. Yet, as soon as his two-year probation from that incident lifted, he challenged Ashley for custody again and won. Their daughter was 5 at the time. Soon after, her ex-husband was arrested again, giving custody back to Ashley.
To heal from the trauma, Ashley moved with her daughter to Southern Oregon to be closer to family. While it was up to her ex-husband to travel for custody visits, he demanded Ashley, who had no car, take a Greyhound bus up to Portland every other weekend so he could see his daughter. He argued this arrangement was impeding his visitation time. He told Ashley he would challenge for custody unless she moved back to Portland. Fearing another legal battle, she agreed.
"I was staying with my best friend when I first moved up to Portland so that I could get there as soon as possible," Ashley said. "Even though I did what he asked, he still took me to court to challenge the custody arrangement, stating that I was an unfit parent since I was homeless and living with my friend."
Despite his record of abusing women, his many years on probation and many orders to complete batterer's intervention classes, Ashley's ex-husband eventually won custody when their daughter was 8 years old. Ashley forgave nearly $15,000 in unpaid child support in hopes her good-faith act would inspire her ex-husband to make a kind gesture back and drop the custody battle. But Ashley believes the decision largely hinged on her lack of stable housing.
Homeless transgender women in Pacific Northwest face greater risk of violence
Most women who have experienced homelessness report experiencing violence from strangers. Transgender women find they face additional challenges.
For nearly seven years, the same judge presided over every custody and restraining order hearing related to her case.
"The judge knew all of the history and knew my ex-husband was not a safe person," Ashley said. "The judge told him and his lawyer they should be ashamed that they were acting as if his abuse was no big deal. But when that judge left for a higher position, the new judge did not know the history. I didn't know I needed to submit all the history into evidence. I am not a lawyer."
Alone in the courtroom once again, Ashley felt herself break. Despite practicing her remarks in the mirror in the days leading up to the hearing, she was not better than the expensive lawyer she was up against. She was exhausted.
"They wanted me to go and question another witness who had said I was a bad mother," she recalled. "But I couldn't. I just cried. I had no more fight left in me. I couldn't emotionally function. I was there alone and I felt like there wasn't anything more I could say and that's the final time he got custody."
To address the gaps in support that Ashley experienced, Portland's neighbor to the north has been growing a legal advocate program. David Martin, a King County prosecutor in charge of its domestic violence services division, said he believes advocates can be just as effective as lawyers when helping victims navigate the court system. Victims don't always need a lawyer, but they do need someone to help them understand the complexities of the law and to offer emotional support during trauma-inducing hearings.
In King County, a study showed while victims with lawyers are most successful, an advocate is still more successful than victims alone, said Colleen McIngalls, King County director of victim services.
For those without an advocate, McIngalls' office created a program similar to TurboTax that asks victims several questions and then generates a filled-out protective order petition form. The petitions are close to 50 pages long and are confusing, McIngalls said. Her office also offers victims the choice to do their court appearance virtually, which allows them to not be in the same room as their abuser. They could, for example, be in a domestic violence shelter with a supportive advocate sitting next to them, McIngalls said.
Those advocates can also offer safety planning, which can include discussing where the safest place to live might be when working through the housing process.
"There is no good way to be a survivor in court," Ashley said. "They say if the survivor stayed with her abuser, then she was not being a protective parent, and so her kids will get taken away until she leaves the abuse and gets into a domestic violence shelter -- even though she is not in control of if she can get into a shelter.
"And if she leaves the abuse and is homeless, then that is a mark against her."
Nicole Hayden is an investigative journalist on the Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team. Do you have a domestic violence, restraining order, housing or related legal story you believe needs to be investigated? Contact Nicole at [email protected].
SOURCE: See how the survey was conducted
Nicole Hayden can be reached at [email protected] or at (810) 210-1561.
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