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The most useful feature of a protection order is not what it forbids. It is that breaching it is itself an offence, which means the police can act on the breach without having to prove the original abuse all over again.

That is the whole value of the document, and it only works if breaches are reported and recorded. This is how to make that happen.

What counts as a breach

More than people assume. Read your own order, because the terms vary, and a breach is anything it prohibits.

• Coming to your home, workplace, the children’s school or any other named place.
• Contacting you directly — calling, messaging, emailing, or turning up.
• Contacting you through somebody else. Messages passed by a relative, a friend or a child usually count where the order prohibits contact, and this is the most common form.
• Contacting you from a new number or a new account.
• Waiting nearby, or repeatedly being where you are.
• Threats, whether direct or passed on.
• Damaging property, where the order covers it.
• Coming to a place at a time he is prohibited from being there, even if you were not present.

“He only wanted to see the children” is not an exception unless the order provides for it. Contact arrangements, where they exist, are part of the order and outside them there is no permission.

In the first hour

1. Get somewhere safe. Everything else is second.
2. Call 112 if he is there now, or if you are frightened. Say that there is a protection order in force and that he is breaching it. Say the address first.
3. Do not respond to him. Not to tell him to stop, not to remind him of the order. A reply is used later to suggest contact was mutual.
4. Screenshot everything before anything disappears — the message, the number or account name, the date and time visible in the image.
5. Write it down while it is fresh: date, time, place, what happened, what was said, who saw it.
6. Note any witnesses. A gateman, a neighbour, a colleague, a shopkeeper. Get names and numbers the same day.
7. Tell your lawyer, and tell whoever you were told to report breaches to.

Reporting it properly

Go to the police in person and take the order with you. Take a copy to leave with them, and keep your original.

Say clearly: there is a protection order, made by this court, on this date, and it has been breached. Breach of the order is itself an offence. That sentence matters, because an officer who has not seen many of these may treat the underlying conduct as a minor domestic matter rather than as the breach it is.

Ask for it to be recorded, ask for the reference number, and write down the name of the officer. If you are told it is a civil matter or a family matter, ask for the Divisional Police Officer and ask for the gender desk. What to do when you meet that response is set out separately.

Then tell your lawyer, because there is usually a second route: going back to the court that made the order. A court takes a poor view of its own orders being ignored, and it can vary the order, add conditions, or commit somebody for contempt.

Why the small ones matter

The most common mistake is not reporting the minor breaches. A message, a car outside once, a relative passing on that he wants to talk. Each feels too small to bother anybody with.

Reported individually they look trivial. Reported together, as fourteen entries over two months, they look like exactly what they are — a person testing whether the order means anything.

And they establish the pattern that makes the serious one actionable. A first breach reported after six months of unreported ones is much weaker than a first breach reported on the day. Report the small ones, in writing, every time, even where you expect nothing to happen. The record is the point.

How to keep it and what a court finds persuasive both apply here.

If nothing is done

This happens and there are real routes.

Go back to the court through your lawyer rather than relying only on the police. Ask the court to enforce its own order — that is the strongest lever available and it is the one most often unused.

Escalate within the police: the DPO, then the state Command, then the Police Complaint Response Unit or the Police Service Commission. Complain to the National Human Rights Commission where a case has been handled badly.

And keep reporting anyway. A file showing eleven reports and no action is itself powerful, both for a court and for a complaint about the handling.

Reviewing the order

If it is being breached regularly, the order may not be doing enough and it can be varied.

Ask your lawyer about widening the prohibited places, adding the children’s school, prohibiting third-party contact explicitly, requiring him to leave the family home, or extending the duration. Orders are not fixed, and a pattern of breaches is exactly the evidence needed to strengthen one.

It is also worth reviewing your own arrangements. Persistent breach usually means he knows where you are and when — what to do about persistent pursuit covers routes, routines and what to change.

The thing to hold onto

An order that is breached and reported is doing its job, even when it feels like it is failing. Each recorded breach makes the next step easier, and the file you are building is what eventually produces a response.

The orders that fail are the ones where the breaches were never written down.

Questions people ask

If you need help now

If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, email us at hello@healbridge.org, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.