- Forms
- The protective order must be reduced to a Uniform Abuse Prevention Order form.1 The judge will expect you to complete this form. All necessary relief should be checked.
- Petitioner’s Address
- The Louisiana Protective Order Registry (LPOR) Forms provide a space for the petitioner’s protected residential address. If the protective order includes a specific home address that the defendant must stay away from, the order may not sufficiently protect a petitioner who moves to a new address. Since petitioners often move, the better practice may be to include a provision prohibiting the defendant from going “anywhere the petitioner may reside,” in addition to listing any specific addresses that are safe to list. The same logic applies to stay-away provisions regarding employment. If the current residential address and place of employment is already known to the defendant, the stay-away provision could be drafted to include those specific addresses and anywhere else the petitioner may reside or be employed.
- Child Custody
- Visitation and custody provisions should minimize risk to the petitioner and her children. Avoid using joint custody and “reasonable visitation” clauses. “Reasonable visitation” is never appropriate in domestic violence cases. Without specific visitation provisions, an abusive party is likely to weaponize visitation to control the client and to harass her with visitation demands and contempt actions to enforce or expand visitation. There is no reason to assume that a client and her abusive former partner will suddenly agree about what is “reasonable.” Visitation exchanges are also a common setting for conflict and re-assault.
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Provisions for custody and visitation should be specific, easy to understand, and enforceable. For example, protective orders should explicitly state where and when visitation exchanges can occur and who can be present. They should create explicit but limited exceptions for the abusive parent’s contact with or about the children. Use a supervised visitation center or police station for safe exchanges whenever possible.
- Mutual Protective Orders
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Mutual protective orders should almost never be agreed to. Mutual protective orders, if not factually justified, re-victimize the victim, provide an abuser with another vehicle to harass the victim, and can impair future legal rights for victims. Lawyers often have unrealistic expectations about victims’ normal reactions to abuse. The fact that a victim has engaged in physical resistance or even retaliatory violence against an abusive partner is rarely a justification for a mutual protective order. A protective order should apply only to the person who presents a risk of future harm to the other. A victim who is trying to end the relationship does not fall into that category.2
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- 1La. C.C.P. art. 3607.1; see Louisiana Protective Order Registry Index of Uniform Abuse Prevention Order Forms, La. Sup. Ct.
- 2For further discussion, see Section 3.5.