While some divorces involve two rational, well-behaved people who have simply grown apart, others involve one rational, well-behaved person and one person who is unreasonable, unpredictable, and potentially abusive. In those situations, you need to take extra precautions to stay safe during and after the divorce process.
At Children First Family Law, we are committed to preserving relationships and rebuilding families. But we know that in some cases, those relationships need to be highly structured for the protection of both physical and mental health. If your former partner has violent tendencies or an explosive temper, or acts in any way that you find frightening, it is vitally important to take the right steps to protect yourself and other members of your family.
Protection Orders: Know What They Can and Can’t Do
If you have fears for your safety, you can ask the court for a protection order, often referred to as a restraining order. This can be sought anytime at the courthouse in the county where you live with a judicial officer who is on duty to hear these issues immediately. If you already have a divorce or allocation of parental responsibilities case filed, the judicial officer on that case will be the one usually to consider the request for the protective order. You can make this request to protect just yourself or you and your children. The request requires you to tell the court what the other person has done, and if the court finds you credible and believes you are in danger, the judicial officer will grant a temporary protection order that has to be served on the parent it is against; then the court will set a hearing shortly down the road to have evidence and testimony presented as to whether the order can be extended and maintained.
If granted, the order will tell your former partner that they are not allowed to take specific actions. Depending on the situation, this might include provisions ordering your former partner to stay away from your home or work, ordering your former partner to stop threatening you, ordering your former partner not to contact you, or a range of other prohibitions. However, just because you have a piece of paper from the court does not mean you have actual protection against physical harm. Your former partner can violate the order and put your safety or the safety of other loved ones at risk.
What a protection order does accomplish is to establish penalties for your former partner if they take action against you. It is wise to request a restraining order when you need one, but don’t rely on it as a foolproof measure to keep you safe.
Establish a Safe Space
You need to have at least one, and possibly more places of refuge you can go to if your former partner becomes violent. This might be the home of a friend or family member or a domestic violence shelter. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for a key—knowing that you have a safe place to get to at any hour of the day or night can help ease many concerns. Try to keep a bag packed with essentials in your car if you need to make an emergency getaway.
Secure Your Home
Whether you are living in the family home or have moved to a different location, you need to take measures to make it secure. Change the locks, if your spouse has a key, and don’t forget about the combination to the garage door or gates to the yard. Consider installing an alarm with a panic button that creates a direct line to the police station. Keep your phone with you so you can call for help from anywhere. If you have children, make sure they know the best place to go within the home in case of emergency, and which neighbors they can go to for assistance if necessary.
Protect Your Records and Finances
If possible, before even bringing up the idea of divorce, it is a good idea to take steps to secure critical documents and make copies of financial information. Set up a safe deposit box for your birth certificate, passport, legal papers, diplomas, and precious mementos. Include jewelry or other valuables that belonged to you before you got married. Many spouses seek to get revenge or delay the divorce process by destroying items of importance.
Your spouse might also try to isolate you from joint financial assets, so if you can set up a bank account in your own name to provide a secure source of funds, that may be a good idea. Assets in that account may still be jointly owned and require division in the divorce process, but you are entitled to use marital property to support yourself.
Your Situation May Require Litigation
If you are leaving a partner who is abusive, controlling, narcissistic, or vindictive, you need to find a divorce attorney who is prepared to overcome the challenges and protect your interests. It is quite likely that you will not be able to negotiate all terms of your divorce settlement, and you will need to ask the judge to make determinations in court.
You may need to find an attorney who is prepared to litigate effectively to protect your interests. If you have children, you need an attorney who knows how to build structure into the relationship with your former partner so that rules will be respected when co-parenting.
In Colorado, laws have been rapidly changing to expand attention paid in family courts to the issue of domestic violence, including defining DV as not just being when a partner physically abuses the other but also when there is coercive control, financial and emotional abuse, isolation, pet abuse, and so on – all concerning indicators of DV. Laws have increased to give children more of a voice in court when there is DV and child abuse present as well. These are complicated new statutes and not all attorneys are well-versed in them, so be sure when you find a lawyer that the person can tell you what those new statutes are and how they can be used to help protect you and your children.
At Children First Family Law, we advocate on behalf of children, so we do not represent parents in these types of cases. We cannot even make recommendations for legal counsel for parents because that could be seen as creating a conflict of interest if we were brought in to protect the child’s best interests.
Our goal here is to provide some basic information and resources to point you in the right direction so that you can move forward safely to a positive outcome that puts your child’s well-being ahead of everything else. We invite you to check out our resources including our podcasts and blogs. To find the right attorney to protect your interests in this type of situation, you might consult the Colorado Bar Association or other lists of attorneys such as Super Lawyers for a list of family law attorneys practicing in your area. You also could contact domestic violence advocates to ask for references to attorneys.