Page 9 - MarchApril25 Report

The effects of such traumatic history
can make the filing process feel prohibi-
tively challenging and demoralizing. Add
to that the stress of the actual hearing
where the Petitioner must take an oath, sit
before a stranger in a robe, and share their
most intimate and possibly embarrassing
moments “on the record.” It is no wonder
many of them, on average 77% yearly and
as much as 80%2, do not follow through
in appearing for their full hearings even
when they could be granted a final, long-
term protection order. The very place they
must go to reach safety may feel unsafe.
We at Hamilton County
DR Court realized we
needed to remove imped-
iments that discourage
Petitioners from filing or
following through with
their filings. Of course, our
Court is only one player in
a host of agencies that come into contact
with domestic violence victims. Hamilton
County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey,
whose deputies routinely serve our Court’s
protection orders, simultaneously recog-
nized a need for improvement and better
communication between agencies. She
is acutely aware that serving protection
orders is one of the most dangerous oper-
ations our law enforcement officers carry
out in their line of duty and that we need
to make it as safe as possible.
Sheriff McGuffey and DR Court’s
Administrative Judge Anne Flottman
shared their mirroring disquietudes and
ultimately created the Hamilton County
Domestic Violence Task Force (DV
Task Force), extending an open invita-
tion to every city and county agency that
touches victims and survivors of domestic
violence. Dozens have shown up to have
a seat at the work table, including repre-
sentatives from Hamilton County Court
of Common Pleas, Hamilton County
Municipal Court, Hamilton County
Clerk of Courts, Hamilton County
Prosecutor’s Office, City of Cincinnati
Prosecutor’s Office, Hamilton County
Probation Department, Women Helping
Women, Hamilton County Commission
on Girls and Women, TriHealth CARES,
YWCA Greater Cincinnati, Legal Aid
Society of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio Crime
Victim Justice Center, UC College of Law
— DV Clinic, and more.
The DV Task Force’s goals are simple:
do better for domestic violence victims
and make the process safer for everyone,
including victims, alleged abusers, law
enforcement officers serving the orders,
and the public. The only requirements
to participate are a willingness to ask
tough questions, take accountability, and
collaborate. The DV Task Force meets on a
biweekly basis where we talk openly about
mistakes that have been made and how to
prevent their recurrence. We highlight the
practices that are working and share our
success stories. Everyone is eager to under-
Victims often have no idea they are victims,
steps away from becoming survivors.
This is just the life they live every day.
stand more about each other’s role and
what we can learn from each other. The
result is something special — a multi-dis-
ciplinary group of professionals of varying
(and irrelevant, for our purposes) political
views who share a common goal and are
actually doing something about it. When
he took office, Clerk of Courts Pavan
Parikh initiated ways to streamline the
domestic violence petition process in the
General Division of Common Pleas (for
non-family and non-household member
cases), and is now extending his expertise
to DR Court.
As we at DR Court became more
educated through our participation in
the DV Task Force, we identified funda-
mental changes within our structure
that needed to be made and got to work.
First, rather than randomly assigning
domestic violence cases to our general
docket courts, we created a
dedicated team of trauma-in-
formed specialists to hear
these cases. The court now
has four magistrates — Karen
Falter, Jeremy Richards, Craig
Webb, and Amie Wright —
who hear about 90% of the
domestic violence cases. They have been
trained in the complex and often insid-
ious dynamics of domestic violence and
meet biweekly to discuss best practices,
unique or novel questions of law or proce-
dure, and recent case law, and to generally
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