Protection Orders

The HoS reports:

An emotional Judith Collins has revealed her personal pain at the loss of a cousin, murdered when her husband breached a protection order.

The Justice Minister spoke to the Herald on Sunday yesterday, after announcing plans to use GPS monitors to track violent men and stop them going near women they had threatened or attacked.

The GPS monitor plan sounds a good initiative. Ideally it could be done so an the person being protected is also notified if (for example) they get within 500 metres of their house, so they can take action (as well as automatiically notify authorities).

Sadly the reality is that for many people, a protection order has little impact. Over 2,000 a year are broken. I was debating with friends yesterday whether one should have automatic jail sentence for breaches – even say seven days. So there is absolute certainty if you breach one, you will go to jail.

The problem with that is sometimes (not often) protection orders are granted on false evidence, as we saw with Helen Milner who got her son arrested for breaching such an order, after Milner forged text messages from him.