Divorce, Protection Orders, and the Downside of Being Male

When you’re a man, and you’re going through a divorce, you have a couple of significant things going against you. The one you can’t avoid is the theoretically no-longer-true but realistically still pretty true assumption that mothers are better parents than fathers. Even if they’re told specifically not to take gender into account, any group of people who know the genders of each parent are strongly biased toward giving custody to the mother if joint custody is off the table.

The one you can avoid, but not through any action of your own, is the protection order. Protection orders are a crucially important part of the divorce process designed to remove abused spouses and/or children from their abuser. Because it’s actually pretty critical to get them separated quickly, a protection order is generally issued ex parte, meaning “without the accused party present.”

Thus it is quite normal for a man to discover that a protection order has been issued when the police or arrive at his door with a signed court order forcing him to pack up and move out, leaving his wife and children behind. Only after he’s been served the papers (and is thus legally bound to obey them) does he get to know that he has been accused, much less what he has been accused of.

Ideally, that’s not a big deal, because in theory, the protection order doesn’t actually affect the divorce proceeding — the law is constructed in such a way that a protection order is theoretically irrelevant. In reality, however, protection orders have an enormous impact on a divorce proceeding, even when they’re completely extraneous and based on false allegations. For example, one of the chief factors in determining child custody involves looking at what roles each parent plays in the childrens’ daily lives. If you aren’t allowed within a few hundred feet of your children, well, guess what?

Furthermore, a protection order doesn’t come with money — so it’s on the accused man to pay for his move, a place to live, and so on…all while still being legally obligated to pay the same bills he did before back at the home he’s no longer allowed to live in. Worst case scenario, the soon-to-be-ex-wife can even appeal to the judge to have spousal support and child support payments leveraged early in order to make ends meet without access to the husband’s usual financial input.

But that’s not all — protection orders, even though they are issued on an accusation instead of evidence and are by their nature temporary, can and do show up on criminal background checks for the rest of your life. So you can, in one stroke, not only lose your wife and kids and end up saddled with a bunch of financial obligations you can’t meet, but also destroy your future chances of getting a job, an apartment, or anything else that involves a background check. All that, and one recent study showed that nearly 70% of abuse allegations that were made during child custody disputes were deemed “false or unnecessary!”

Unfortunately for the men getting divorced across Michigan, there’s only one real way to avoid this scenario: don’t ever lose your cool in the first place. When conflicts do occur, record everything, preferably on video but at least on audio. And as soon as you realize a divorce is in the works, put together a ‘go bag’ and arrange with a friend or family member to be your landing pad in case you get the boot.