Legal Help for Domestic Violence Victims

WomensLaw is the first and only free, legal resource for survivors of domestic & dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking that offers safety and legal information and resources in "plain language" in both English and Spanish. We are dedicated to empowering survivors and their advocates to make informed decisions about their options, safety, and legal remedies. 

From February 1, 2021 to April 30, 2021, 989,122 people accessed the life-saving information that is housed on WomensLaw.org.

In the past three months (February 2021 through April 2021), we worked directly with 1,168 victims, survivors, and their friends, advocates, or family members through our Email Hotline. This unique hotline offers victims a direct line to ask a question of our attorneys and volunteers, who specialize in domestic violence and the law. We respond to every request as quickly as possible, but take time to respond thoughtfully and include individualized resources and information. We frequently correspond back and forth with the women and men who write in, and many are grateful for our assistance and support. We also hear from the advocates providing direct services to victims who use WomensLaw.org to support their clients. Some responses we have received over the Email Hotline are below:

I am so grateful and impressed at how much time and effort you went through to provide me with the information below - thank you. I expected a short answer but you went above and beyond my expectations - grateful. (WomensLaw Email Hotline, March 2021) 

And:

Thank you, your organization has been amazing at providing guidance and support.  I wouldn’t have known where to start without this type of service and I never in a million years ever thought it would be me needing this. (WomensLaw Email Hotline, February 2021)

We answer questions and provide our expertise on a wide range of topics - including custody, divorce, relocation, and more. Often, victims or their loved ones are writing in to us to get some basic legal information about their situation when they cannot find legal representation. Although we do not provide legal advice, we can explain relevant laws that may help the victim to make an informed decision.

It is especially rewarding when someone tells us that we explained the information and provided resources and are also one of the first people to make them feel heard and understood. Here is one such reply that we received on the Email Hotline:

You did awesome and it made me feel better. When someone actually helps me my husband and I smile again knowing there is help put there. We get so emotionally exhausted it physical and emotionally wears me out. Yea I'm going to get those links out thank you and I will keep you posted.

 (WomensLaw Email Hotline response, March 2021)

We are constantly updating our website (http://www.WomensLaw.org) – making changes and additions to it daily. Our priority is to make sure that the legal information that we have is current with changes in the laws and to continue to add new information that would be useful for victims and survivors of abuse. Between February 1, 2021 and April 30, 2021, we made hundreds of updates, such as:

• Based on recent changes to the Puerto Rico Civil Code, we added 13 new statutes related to custody and 5 new statutes related to divorce to our Selected Puerto Rico Statutes page.
• Based on a change in the law in California that adds coercive control to their definition of domestic violence, we updated the What is the legal definition of domestic violence? question on the California Restraining Orders page. The update is in English and Spanish!
• We updated and reorganized our Wyoming Gun Laws section to make it more state specific and easier to use. We also added one related statute to our Wyoming Selected State Statutes section. All changes in English.
• Based on a change in the law that allows a judge to order the abuser to refrain from remotely controlling any connected devices affecting the home, vehicle or property of the person protected by the order, we updated What protections can I get in an order of protection? in our New York Restraining Orders section. The change is in English and Spanish.
• In our About Abuse page, we updated the content and links in English and Spanish in the In the Workplace, which has information about sexual harassment in the workplace and workplace restraining orders. 
• In our North Carolina Civil No Contact Orders (“50C Orders”) section, we added information about an employer being able to file on behalf of an abused employee to the question Am I eligible to file for a civil no-contact order? Changes made in English and Spanish.
• We updated and reorganized 18 questions on our New Hampshire Gun Laws section to make it more state specific and easier to use. We also added two relevant statutes to our New Hampshire Selected State Statutes section. The changes in the gun laws section are in English, but Spanish is coming soon!
• We added a new question in English to our Ohio Domestic Violence/Dating Violence Protection Orders page called Can I get a protection order if I’m a minor? We added a similar question called Can I get a protection order if I’m a minor? What if the abuser is a minor? to our Stalking or Sexually Oriented Offense Protection Orders page. Spanish soon to come. We also revised four questions to add the term “dating violence protection order” and changed the name of the section to make it clearer that this section applies to victims of dating violence too, not just domestic violence.
• We added links to a motion to modify or terminate a protection order, a motion for contempt, and a dating violence protection order to our Ohio Download Court Forms page. Changes made in English and Spanish.
• We updated and reorganized 12 questions in our Nebraska State Gun Laws section to make it easier to use and more state specific. All changes in English, but Spanish is coming soon!
• We added the crime of cyberstalking to our Washington Crimes page in English and Spanish and to the Selected Washington Statutes page in English.
• We added the Elder Victims of Crime Program (part of Area Agency on Aging of Western Arkansas) to our Arkansas Local Programs page and Legal Assistance page in English (Spanish coming soon). We also updated all of the resources in our Arkansas Legal Assistance and added six new legal organizations in English and Spanish.
• We revised the New Jersey Download Court Forms page to add links to petitions to modify, enforce, and dismiss a restraining order. Changes made in English and Spanish.

.…and these are just a handful of the changes and improvements that we made over the past three months! See them all here on our What’s New page: https://www.womenslaw.org/about/news

Thank you for supporting WomensLaw and the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV).

Stay in the loop! Sign up for occasional action alerts and updates from NNEDV at: NNEDV.org/signup

Links:

• What's new on WomensLaw
• WomensLaw Email Hotline
• National Network to End Domestic Violence