Wow, what a range of answers, thank you for all the feedback and the many suggestions. I will answer everyone as best as I can. Bear with me for a long response as I have to answer several points, mainly personal ones that I wasn’t going to bring into this but now have to, to respond to your questions.
Firstly, this is a true story, it’s something that is happening to me right now and without diminishing the help I sought and continue to seek for myself, part of the reason I posted it was to try to expose the loopholes an abusive spouse can slip through, too. People assume that obtaining their legal and human rights in a modern society is relatively simple, and that one only needs to point to one’s rights to have the law immediately leap in to enforce them. I know that’s what I thought, once. Not true.
To answer one comment, I don’t have family of my own. Any old friends there were, are also friends of my spouse, and I couldn’t possibly expect anyone to betray one of us to help the other. The couple of others I know, who also know my situation, don’t want to go anywhere near my spouse in person and I can’t say I blame them.
To answer some more of people’s main points:
I live in San Jose, in California, an urban area with at least the usual social problems: a mixed ethnic community, poverty, homelessness, mental health issues and so on. It is a place in which one might expect many organizations to be working to help the community. In other words, I am not out in the countryside living up a tree, I’m in a place where there ought to be extensive social resources.
However, as a result of financial cutbacks by the State and I guess, just about every other funding organization, the agencies which once provided pro-bono legal support across a wide area of family law are no longer able to do so. The state is so broke there has even been a call to withdraw benefits that people already rely on.
The principal pro-bono service, though still advertising the services they once had, will no longer offer any facilities to people in divorce unless they are female and with children. It’s important to note that just because a service is advertised on a web site, doesn’t mean it still exists. This is often the case.
The law schools have nothing other than a meager grant which is spent immediately, and they too no longer offer the support they once did. When I called I was told to call back maybe next year.
Organizations which provide legal help for immigrants or those with mental health issues are able to do so only within their mandates; divorce does not fall within those mandates and therefore they are not permitted to represent people whose cases, even if there is an immigration or health issue underlying them, have any association with divorce matters.
There is no such thing as free legal aid for family law cases, though there is a court facilitator who can help with completing the paperwork. There are also paralegals who, for a fee, will help complete paperwork, but they are not allowed to offer legal advice or representation, which only qualified attorneys are permitted to do. I can handle the paperwork, that’s not my problem.
Additionally this isn’t a matter for social services, and to the person who mentioned shelters, they won’t get involved in anything other than providing food and a bed and sometimes not even that. One of the two shelters here no longer even provides a bed for more than one night a year, and there is a public lottery for beds there beyond that. They do not feed anyone who doesn’t have a bed. The other provides both bed and meals but nothing beyond.
The local church support group that once helped with food and clothing and other resources for the homeless and poor, regardless of gender or status, no longer does so but will only help single women with young children. The emergency support facility for abused women, and the independent mental health shelter and advocacy organization here, do not offer legal aid in divorce cases.
I have spoken at length with, and been advised by, at least two social workers. I have gone places and attempted to do things on the basis of information that qualified and responsible social workers have given me. They have not helped. In most cases they don’t have current information and, or, have been fed the wrong information by other government agencies. I’ve been through a number of County officials none of whom had the correct information about their own services but thought they did, or just guessed.
So, to the person who wrote “There are plenty of places abused spouses can turn to for legal protection”, yes, I believed there would be, too. It is so easy to make sweeping statements when one has no idea at all of the facts, isn’t it? I appreciate your taking up your time to enter the conversation, but really, you are not a part of the solution if you don’t understand the problem. You may be correct in that Fluther is not going to be able to help, but I would observe that Fluther is not an entity, it’s a community, and people in that community have their own individual ways of supporting others and the right to choose whether they become involved or not. Since I have to assume that you’ve not been appointed representative of the entire community, I would respectfully suggest you don’t take it upon yourself to act as its spokesman unless you have the community’s mandate to do so. Anything else is arrogance. And your lack of knowledge in this doesn’t qualify you, in my opinion anyway, as a candidate to represent anyone.
Moving along, I had to decide at a very early stage that I would have to defend myself. So I did a lot of homework, and to cut the story short I have been able to raise the paperwork for myself and progress to my present position without benefit of an attorney. As someone commented, in an uncontested divorce it is pretty easy and most people do represent themselves these days. With no income it was simple to obtain a fee waiver, too, so that there were no fees to file papers or obtain copies from the court.
However, I had not predicted that my spouse would contest the divorce. In hindsight maybe this was foolish of me, but I thought that since she was the one who had filed, she would be the one to want to settle. It did not occur to me that she would fight over the divorce which she unilaterally decided she wanted. That’s how it’s worked out though, and in the months since this all began, neither she nor her attorney has communicated with me, or served me any papers, or indeed done anything whatsoever. This has proved to be a very smart course of action, as they know I have no money and can’t hope to be able to fight once it gets to the stage of throwing court orders around.
To answer those who have wondered how it was even possible to get into this situation, yes, I know it’s not what you’d expect. For a start, you’d expect the police to jump in there right at the start, and you’d expect the law to prevail. Wrong.
When the first event took place, I was already aware that a person could not be legally ejected from their home of many years, regardless of who owned that home. Even if they had no financial share in it, even if their name was not on the deeds, the other party would have to go to the court and obtain an order for independent possession before taking any action.
The reality, is different. In practice, if a person is able to prevent access, just by the simple expedient of locking the doors and padlocking the gates, even though that’s illegal, they can get away with it and that’s that. Since it is a civil, rather than criminal offense, the police will take no action other than suggest the ejected party gets a lawyer. But by then, they are already out and can’t get back in. Trust me on this one, because it happened to me and it was me that had called the police. I was on the property but not in the house, and it was a simple matter of having all the doors locked and padlocked against me while I was looking the other way. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to secure a building, someone could do it to you while you’re out watering the lawn.
The police also have the power to permit a person who has been ejected in this way to enter his or her home, accompanied by them, in order to get some personal effects. But they’ll deny it. When I asked if I could be allowed to get any of my things, they told me no. This despite them telling me that they knew I had not been responsible for any domestic violence myself. At no time was I accused of any mistreatment of anyone. But the police just said “you need to get a lawyer” and off they went.
So, yes, despite it being illegal, you can be turned out of your home without warning or explanation and the police won’t do a thing. Not their jurisdiction.
What is in their jurisdiction, and to answer another comment above, is violence against property. I was told that (should I be considering it) were I to attempt to use any force in order to get back into my own home, I would be arrested for using violence against the building.
Now, about attorneys. Yes, they will give you an hour, pro-bono, during which they’ll examine your case, tell you that you’re in the right, and that for $4000 they’ll fix all your problems in a month. To the question “what help do you offer to someone without $4000”, they can only answer “nobody, but nobody, will take a divorce, pro-bono. Nobody”. And that turns out to be exactly right. I’ve been told by attorneys several times now, that nobody works pro-bono on a divorce, and in general, nobody works pro-bono at all unless they can see they’ll get paid out of the proceeds of a case – i.e. where they are getting their hands on a trust fund, or similar assured value. I have written to many lawyers who have not even bothered to reply. I have given up emailing attorneys, because they never reply. They can’t be bothered, unless there’s money up front. It’s very frustrating, and it’s a disrespectful way to behave toward people who are asking for help.
The first attorney I spoke to looked at the details of the case, described my spouse as “a psycho” and declared confidently that I could be getting thousands in spousal support within a couple of months. Fantastic. All I had to do was hand over $4000 in cash and it would all be easy. OK, since it was so easy, would the attorney accept the $4000 as a deferred fee, taken out of all the thousands he was about to get for me? Nope. Did he think anyone else would? Nope.
See, the thing is I DO understand what everyone is suggesting and I’m not claiming that anyone is being intentionally unhelpful just because they’re suggesting things that don’t work. We are all of us, me included, brought up to believe the law protects us, and that when bad people do illegal things to us, those people will be punished. It’s a fundamental pillar of our society. We like to think that when a person claims a policeman has beaten him, he is either lying, or the policeman must have had some good reason. We want to believe in the law. We want to believe that if we’ve been living in a home for ten years, we can always be sure that it’ll be there tomorrow. We want to believe that abuse doesn’t happen, or at least, happens to people in different situations from us. You know, common people, stupid people, aggressive people, anyone other than normal people like us. When someone says they’ve been abused, and assuming that anyone believes them, the first question people ask is “why? What did you do to deserve it?” There is no “why”. There is no rational explanation for why a person treats another in anything other than a humane way. But most people’s reaction, initially, is to wonder whether the person doing the accusing is telling the truth. We are brought up to believe that normal people are good and abnormal people are bad, and we think we can tell the difference. We are encouraged to believe that anyone who complains about anything is weak, or wrong, or both, because all anyone has to do is ask the establishment for help, and there it is. Complainers are whingers, who don’t have the moral fiber to tackle their own problems. I know. These are things we want to believe and we’re encouraged to believe. I hear you.
Sorry this took so long. And even now, I’ve not got around to my current problem anyway, which is how to raise money to pay process servers and get to and from a court in another town, when there are no funds. But perhaps its more important to highlight the shortcomings of the system in general. People assume they’re protected by a legal safety net which actually isn’t there. They assume, as I did, that there’s a yawning chasm between “us” and the poor, and that, as I’ve heard said, people “choose to be homeless”. Maybe some do – I’ve never met one, but maybe they exist. In any case, that yawning chasm is actually a very fine line.
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