They Help Bring Order to an Out-of-Control Relationship

To escape her husband’s violence, the woman with anxious eyes and trembling hands must first relive it in graphic detail.

In a small office in an Orange courthouse, she tells one stranger, then another, about the beatings, the theft, the times she pushed a couch in front of the doors to keep her husband out of their home in an Orange County beach city.

The woman’s visit to the Domestic Violence Assistance Program, a daylong process that for many clients results in a 25-day restraining order against a spouse, former spouse, relative, girlfriend or boyfriend tends to be as valuable as it is grueling.

“It feels like you’re a lighthouse,” said Giovanna Businaro, the program’s supervisor. “If they want to find you, they can.”

The seventh-floor program at the Lamoreaux Justice Center is a final stop for many broken relationships, with roughly 20 people coming in daily to use its free services. Counselors provide hand-holding as the clients, the vast majority of them women, fill out piles of paperwork before going to courtrooms in the hope that a judge will grant the order.

Most people seeking temporary restraining orders get them, although judges deny about a dozen of the 200 to 300 requests filed each month.

Several clients also change their minds at the last minute and decide not to ask for them; for example, in October, 42 people opted not to pursue the orders.

Business is steady year round, with a cross-section of clients -- rich and impoverished, all races, the occasional celebrity -- coming through the brown double doors.

On a recent Friday, three women sat at tables just behind a locked door.

The oldest had gray hair and used a walker. Another appeared to be in her 20s, her long dark hair falling over her face as she earnestly filled in the blanks for name, age, description of the most recent abuse. The third stared straight ahead, her tears blurring the ink on her paperwork.

People typically come to the center the first time police intervene, not necessarily the first time something bad happens, Businaro said.

Law enforcement and shelters give out the center’s address and phone number, and the clients come in at 8 a.m. and are told they will probably be there the whole day.

They also must come to court 25 days after they get a restraining order for a more extensive hearing.

A judge then determines if the order will be extended for three years.

They are informed of this and the other facts about obtaining the orders, several times -- by two or three different counselors, in a 10-minute video and in their paperwork.

“They make it a lot easier to go through this process,” said the woman who had been forced to use a couch to keep her husband, a locksmith, out of their house.

The 36-year-old woman did not want her name published for fear of reprisals from her jailed husband, who is set to be released this month.

Coming in to have her current restraining order extended to their two children and her house was something she didn’t want left undone with him about to get out, she said.

“I want it to cover everything,” she said.

Leaving the area is not an option, she said. “It’s my home, and I’m not leaving it. I will not let him scare me into abandoning it.”

As she recounted the last time she saw her husband, though, her voice trembled with fear.

It was a Sunday morning, and the rumble of her neighbors’ lawn mowers drowned out her cries for help. She had confronted him about bringing women into the house while she was at work, and, she says, he attacked her, breaking her jaw and spraining her ankle before she broke though a sliding glass door to escape.

Then she remembered their children, who were left inside to face whatever her husband might do. “I went back in to get them, sure that this would be the day that I died,” she said.

But she escaped and called the police, who arrested her husband on suspicion of corporal injury, threat to terrorize, evading police and violating a restraining order.

With her husband in jail, she didn’t have to face what can be the most difficult part of the daylong process: calling the alleged abuser by 9:30 in the morning so he or she has a chance to attend the afternoon hearing and give the other side.

About 40% of the time, Businaro said, the accused abusers show up, often with friends and family in tow.

Businaro said she and the other counselors leave it to the judges to decide who is in the right. Sometimes a woman will come in to get a restraining order and her alleged abuser will come in for help the next day, Businaro said. They provide services to both.

Sometimes they see the same people over and over, some for a new restraining order against the same person, or others because a different relationship has turned sour.

“We’re here to help, not to judge,” Businaro said.

She doesn’t underestimate the danger of her job. Angry spouses sometimes show up to look for people, and the program’s front office staff must be firm about not letting them behind the locked door.

In emergencies, the courthouse sheriff’s deputies can be summoned within seconds. “Our office is probably the most volatile in this courthouse,” Businaro said.

That danger is something she and her colleagues are careful to translate to their clients.

“We emphasize at the end of the day that just because they have a restraining order doesn’t mean they’re safe,” she said. “It’s not a bulletproof shield.”