A Public Health Approach to the Evolution of Abuse

I. Introduction: An Archaic System and a Hard-Won Education

My story matters because it exposes systemic gaps that will continue to cause profound, fatal harm until we achieve meaningful change. Seven arrests and over a hundred days in jail came at a cost no student loan could ever cover. However, I find peace in viewing the last two years as a hard-won education. I possess a unique, powerful insight into this system, and the determination to share it to prevent future tragedies is exactly what kept me moving forward.

This issue is fundamentally a public health crisis before it is a legal one. Oregon's primary domestic violence legal architecture, the Family Abuse Prevention Act (FAPA), was created 50 years ago in 1976. While the medical community's understanding of psychological trauma has evolved exponentially over the last five decades, our legal infrastructure remains frozen in an era that primarily recognizes physical violence.

Currently, Oregon lacks localized data to evaluate whether protective orders help more people than they harm, or what percentage of orders are weaponized for abuse. I am writing to propose a public-private partnership to incubate a localized, experimental pilot program in Deschutes County to gather this missing data and establish modern intervention guardrails.

We must acknowledge an empirical reality: non-physical coercive control is the last form of abuse that is still socially acceptable to ignore (Stark, 2007; Myhill, 2015). It is not a lesser form of harm; it is differently lethal.

II. Coercive Control, Trauma-Induced Attachment, and Cognitive Disorientation

The shift in domestic violence research toward studying coercive control, which is a continuous pattern of domination involving isolation, micro-regulation, and intimidation, has revealed that psychological entrapment is a primary driver of suicidal thoughts (Stark, 2007). Dominance and intimidation are directly associated with suicidal ideation, whereas explicit physical assault alone is often not (Wolford-Clevenger et al., 2017).

I lived the exact trajectory that research describes:

• Being systematically controlled stripped away my autonomy, producing the immense emotional pain and hopelessness that serve as critical precursors to suicide (Devries et al., 2013).
• The Element of Cognitive Disorientation: When a survivor is subjected to legal manipulation via an unjust protective order, they experience profound, paralyzing confusion. Navigating a protective order violation when you are the actual victim creates a state of psychological shock that fractures a person's ability to process choices rationally.

This disorientation frequently manifests in a trauma response behavior that the legal system misinterprets as criminal non-compliance, but which public health professionals recognize as a severe cognitive collapse. For months, I was trapped in this cycle, compulsively emailing my abuser and explicitly stating that if he did not want to hear from me, he simply needed to stop opening them. Instead, my email analytics revealed that he opened those emails for an approximate total of 500 times. He was not seeking protection; he was actively monitoring and cultivating my trauma response for legal leverage.

Ultimately, he used these communications to execute a tactical arrest at our restitution hearing. This occurred at the exact moment he was about to face judicial scrutiny for accepting thousands of dollars from me without a violation. I walked into the courthouse to find him at the clerk window with my emails, filling out a stalking order petition. I was arrested on the spot. The restitution hearing never happened, and the system effectively shielded him from financial and legal accountability.

The Request for Neurobiological Research: Trauma-Induced Brain Injury

The long-term aftermath of this abuse must be studied as a form of acquired, trauma-induced brain injury. Chronic psychological abuse and systemic entrapment physically rewire how a person processes threat, trust, and memory (Lohmann et al., 2023).

The hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, and neurological shifts carried by survivors are documented biological consequences of prolonged trauma (Pico-Alfonso et al., 2006). These biological changes often manifest as severe behavioral and social destabilization, transforming a survivor's natural interactive style into a profoundly dysregulated trauma state. This is an entirely institutionalized pathology, created not by character flaws, but by systemic failure.

To conceptualize this for those outside the clinical field, it is accurate to map this trauma onto a network security breach: coercive control acts as a persistent, malicious intrusion that systematically hijacks the host's cognitive architecture, overwriting baseline operating protocols until the system collapses. OHA must lead the research into quantifying this lasting neurological damage, treating it with the same medical urgency as a physical traumatic brain injury.

III. The Quiet Victims: Systemic Trauma Imposed on Children

The current protective order infrastructure routinely fails to account for the children caught in the crossfire. When the system blindlists parents without an objective, preliminary investigation, children are subjected to sudden, catastrophic stabilization loss:

• Weaponizing Custody: The police currently lack the appropriate training to navigate a complex "he said, she said" narrative. Yet, their initial on-scene reports can ultimately dictate which parent keeps the children, allowing abusers to use protective orders to strip a loving parent away overnight (Meier, 2020).
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): The sudden, unexplained removal of a parent, coupled with witnessing the weaponization of law enforcement at their home, inflicts immediate psychological trauma on children.
• Downstream Health Costs: This forced separation and manufactured instability dramatically inflates a child's ACE score, tracking directly into long-term public health burdens including developmental delays, juvenile justice involvement, and youth mental health crises.

By allowing the legal system to operate without a public health lens, the state is actively generating a new generation of traumatized individuals.

IV. Post-Separation Abuse and the Fatal Reality of Institutional Erasure

Post-separation abuse frequently involves legal systems abuse, where perpetrators weaponize court filings to prolong litigation and reframe themselves as victims (Douglas, 2018). My own experience tracked this pattern, compounded heavily by clerical errors, administrative carelessness, and a systemic lack of due process within the court system.

While in custody during a severe mental health crisis, I met another woman going through a nearly identical type of abuse. The familiarity I saw in her was devastating. Trapped in the same cognitive disorientation, she was actively writing letters from jail to the very man who had put her there. Her voice carried the same exhaustion and profound confusion that I felt.

She left jail before I did; months later, she took her own life. She was not an outlier. She was a human data point in a pattern this state has not yet acknowledged.

Tragically, her former partner passed away three months later due to a substance-related mortality event, which community members attributed to grief. This underscores a critical public health reality: when the state refuses to intervene early and meaningfully, the uncontained toxicity of the environment can potentially claim the lives of both parties (Spearman et al., 2022). While the overlapping loss of both the petitioner and the respondent to downstream crises may seem like a rare extreme, Oregon's current lack of tracking means the state has no empirical baseline to determine how common this catastrophic double-loss truly is.

V. The Institutional Catalyst: How Biased Policing Escalates Danger

When law enforcement officers respond to a domestic call, they are almost universally unprepared to identify coercive control, post-separation abuse, or DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) tactics (Iyengar, 2009; Harsey & Freyd, 2020). When officers encounter a calm, articulate perpetrator and a distressed, traumatized victim, the perpetrator looks credible and the victim looks unstable.

Officer Bias as an Escalation Catalyst

This lack of training creates an immediate public safety hazard. When officers hang on the petitioner's every word and dismiss the true victim's claims without solid evidence, they are taking sides.

This dismissive treatment by authority figures acts as an immediate psychological catalyst. By stripping away the victim's final hope for safety, officers trigger an intense, desperate fight-or-flight response. The system itself creates the danger, driving the traumatized individual into acute crises where they are highly likely to reactively act out in desperation, such as property damage or desperate communication, which then triggers an arrest. My own trauma response to a prior unjust arrest resulted in criminal mischief during a severe mental health crisis on the day I lost my home.

VI. Fiscal Burden and Statistical Analysis: Reactive Punishment vs. Proactive Mitigation

The current arrest-first framework sits against a sobering national backdrop. National metrics indicate that the age-adjusted United States suicide rate returned to historic peaks recently, with escalating rates particularly notable among adult women (Garnett & Curtin, 2024; CDC, 2025). While suicide is multifactorial, the empirical link between psychological victimization, legal systems abuse, and suicide proneness demands localized structural analysis (Lamis et al., 2010; AFSP, 2025).

Relying entirely on reactive criminal justice interventions rather than proactive public health containment incurs massive, preventable expenditures for Oregon:

• Incarceration Costs: Housing non-violent individuals undergoing acute trauma responses inside county jail facilities costs the state significantly more per day than community-based mental health stabilization programs.
• Emergency Services Strain: Unaddressed legal systems abuse leads to severe behavioral health destabilization, multiplying emergency room visits, crisis line volumes, and psychiatric hold costs.
• Downstream Dependency Cost: When children are unnecessarily separated from primary caregivers due to unvetted protective orders, it triggers immediate legal, foster care, and state family infrastructure expenditures that could be avoided via early mediation.

VII. The Solution: A Deschutes County Experimental Pilot and Capacity-Building Ask

To pioneer a solution without placing a permanent operational or financial burden on the state, I am proposing a Public-Private Incubation Partnership between the Oregon Health Authority and my developing nonprofit organization.

Rather than requesting OHA to permanently fund or absorb this framework, we are formally asking for initial capacity-building assistance and structural seed funding. This state backing will allow us to establish the organizational infrastructure necessary to secure independent federal grants and private philanthropic endowments, ensuring the long-term financial burden rests entirely on the nonprofit sector.

With OHA's initial development support, we propose launching a localized, experimental pilot phase in Deschutes County, where I will personally participate in and oversee its coordination alongside regional stakeholders. This pilot will integrate three core components:

1. Implementation of an Objective Coercive Control Screening Tool

To prevent general crises as well as the weaponization of the judicial system, the pilot will introduce a standardized behavioral health screening tool. This matrix will quickly assist field workers in distinguishing between true safety risks and patterns of post-separation legal systems abuse, ensuring that cross-claims of abuse are objectively investigated rather than ignored.

2. Civil Service of Protective Orders by Trauma-Informed Social Workers

In Deschutes County, the service of non-emergency protective orders will be executed by a trauma-informed social worker, with law enforcement present strictly on standby for safety boundaries. No uniforms will be deployed at front doors or places of employment.

• The social worker will immediately explain the complex 30-day appeal window to the respondent, preventing the legal confusion that drives reactive crises.
• The worker will conduct a brief, dual-safety behavioral health assessment to check for immediate suicide or self-harm risks for both the petitioner and the respondent.

3. Creation of a Localized Respondent Resource Network

Currently, there are zero behavioral health or navigation resources dedicated to respondents caught in this system. This pilot will establish a basic crisis intervention and stabilization protocol in Deschutes County to prevent homelessness, job loss, acute despair, and suicide.

By investing in the initial capacity building of this nonprofit framework, OHA can help build a self-sustaining, community-led infrastructure that modernizes a 50-year-old system, protects child welfare, and saves lives across Oregon.

References

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2. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
3. Myhill, A. (2015). Measuring coercive control: What can we learn from national population surveys? Violence Against Women, 21(3), 355–375.
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