Typology Building toward Understandings in Enforcement of Protective Orders to Domestic Victims

A protective order is designed to prohibit an abuser from further abusing a victim. Although domestic violence has attracted a lot of attentions at the international level, insufficient research is directed to the typology of the victim‐offender relationship, descriptions of violations and judicial outcomes. This research examined the role of individual and contextual factors and legal interventions to protective order violations in Harris County, Texas, USA in calendar year 2002 and 2003. It explored the problem of violence in a family context and conducted investigation of the distinct subgroups based on the victim‐offender relationship, which allowed to formulating this theoretical model typology for descriptions of violations and judicial outcomes.