New York's courts are very good at domestic violence emergencies. A petition is filed and a temporary order of protection can issue the same day. An arrest is made and an order follows at arraignment. These emergency tools are essential; they save lives.

Long before I was a judge, before I was a prosecutor or an attorney for the child, I was a domestic violence advocate in Clinton County. Across every one of those roles, I have watched the same pattern repeat. Systems treat domestic violence as an acute event. For many of the families who come before us, it is chronic.

I chose the word “chronic” carefully and deliberately. Domestic violence is not a disease. No one catches it, and it does not simply happen to a family. It is a pattern of conduct, and the person who chooses that conduct is responsible for it. What is chronic is not its cause but its course: coercion and control that persist for months or years through separations and reconciliations.

Our courts, by design, are built for the crises. Then orders expire, cases close, and files go to storage. When families return, as many do, we assign new docket numbers and begin again. For each family, in each discrete situation, we answer a sustained pattern of conduct with a series of disconnected acute responses.

The return is not the failure

Nothing tests this mismatch more than the alleged victim who “goes back.” She asks to modify a full stay-away order to a refrain-from order. She does not appear for the hearing. She tells the court she wants the case withdrawn. (Most people in her position who come before me are women, though certainly not all.) Too often the system reads these choices as noncompliance, as proof that the original allegations were overstated, or that she is complicit in the abuse.

I would offer a different reading: people living with abuse are the foremost experts on their own safety. The person asking to modify an order may be managing a careful risk calculation in the courtroom. She knows how her partner responds when he feels cornered, when the rent is due, which relative will take the children, and what happens to her household if he loses his job.

The research bears her out. In an 11-city study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003, Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell and her colleagues compared 220 women killed by intimate partners with 343 abused women who were not killed. Estrangement, especially from a controlling partner, emerged as one of the significant predictors of a woman being killed by her partner. If we are measuring separation as success, our “success” is actually a predictor of her heightened danger. Respecting her agency means treating her decisions as considered choices rather than defiance of our expectations.

Agency is not abdication

This is where balance matters, and where I want to be precise. Respecting agency does not mean the court surrenders its own obligations. The same Campbell study found that a prior domestic violence arrest was associated with a lower risk of a woman being killed by her partner. Intervention matters. And some responsibilities cannot be waived by any party: to children who did not choose the household they live in, to public safety, and to the integrity of the court's own orders. Prosecutors may have sound reasons to proceed without a complaining witness, and courts must weigh evidence of whether her change of heart may be the product of coercion rather than ambivalent choice.

Nor does continuity tilt the scales against the accused. Every respondent and every defendant is entitled to the presumption of innocence and to full due process. Continuity is not a thumb on the scale. A judge who knows a family's history is better positioned to be fair to everyone in it, not less. A judge who sees a family over time can discern an isolated incident from an escalating pattern, and can recognize when a new allegation is consistent with the record or contradicted by it. That same history also shows when a respondent has complied with prior orders and made real changes, something a judge meeting the family for the first time may never see.

The goal is narrower and harder: to make the courthouse a place where people living with abuse can return without feeling they have failed us, so that the next time they need us, they come.

What continuity would look like

Some of the architecture already exists. Integrated Domestic Violence courts follow the principle of one family, one judge. In the Third Judicial District, we have domestic violence courts in Albany, Columbia, Rensselaer and Schoharie Counties and in the Albany and Troy City Courts. The question is how to extend that continuity to the rural counties and small Town and Village Courts where many families first encounter the system and where specialized parts do not exist.

We should look for violence where it hides. Domestic violence does not announce itself only in petitions labeled as such. It surfaces in support proceedings, custody disputes and housing matters. That is why the Third Judicial District volunteered Ulster County Family Court as a pilot site for domestic violence screening in support proceedings. A court cannot respond to what it never asks about.

We should build the infrastructure for the long middle of these cases. Courts routinely order supervised visitation, then send families out to find it on their own because there are too few supervised visitation resources available. In 20 of New York’s 62 counties, almost all of them upstate, there is no supervised visitation program at all, and where programs do exist, most are out of reach for families of limited means. In rural communities without public transportation, even a program in the next county can be impossible to reach. The result is either that visits do not happen or that exchanges happen in parking lots. This gap has been recognized for decades. It remains unfilled. Legislation designed to address this shortcoming has now passed both houses of the legislature and awaits action by the governor. It would establish a statewide supervised visitation initiative, with services offered at fees affordable to families of limited means.

We should practice what trauma research has taught us. Inconsistent accounts, missed appearances and recantations are not automatically signs of fabrication. Courts need not excuse them, but they should understand them in context before drawing conclusions.

And we should measure what matters. The number of orders issued tells us how well we respond to emergencies. It does not tell us whether families are safer a year later. Until we ask that second question, we will keep optimizing for the first.

Building a Whole Response

None of this requires us to abandon the emergency tools that work. It requires us to stop mistaking them for the whole response. A “case” that returns to court is not a case we failed. Each returning “case” is a person who still trusts us just enough to come back, and that trust, however fragile, is what makes the next intervention possible. We need to build a whole response that supports victims and their families, holds those who commit abuse accountable, and manages both of these tasks within a system that gives full meaning to the Constitution, due process and the rule of law.

Hon. E. Danielle Jose-Decker is the administrative judge of the Third Judicial District of the New York State Unified Court System. The views expressed are her own.