Many Tampa Injunction Attorneys are asked about the specifics of obtaining injunctions in Florida. It is worth providing a brief bit of background on injunctions prior to discussing how to obtain an injunction. While they are more commonly known as restraining orders outside of Florida, they are formally referred to as injunctions in Florida. There are four types of civil injunctions: domestic violence, sexual violence, dating violence, and repeat violence. A domestic violence injunction’s purpose is to protect against assault, aggravated assault, batter, stalking, kidnapping, sexual assault, or any other criminal physical injury to you or your family.
A Florida injunction can restrain an abuser from committing any acts of domestic violence; award you temporary private use of your home; address issues regarding child support and time-sharing; order the abuser to take batterer’s intervention courses; and it requires the abuser to surrender weapons to the police. Many times these injunctions are used to protect a child from an abusive parent. As you can imagine, these injunctions have significant impact on child custody matters in related cases.
A sexual violence injunction can be filed against someone that is not in your family or living with you; that person committed a sexual act upon or in the presence of a child younger than 16 years old; lured or solicited a child; and you have the reported the sexual violence to the police or the offender has been in prison for sexual violence against you and gets out of prison within the next 90 days. These cases require some sort of act of sexual violence obviously.
A dating violence injunction requires that you dated the other person during/over the last 6 months, and had an expectation for continued affection or sexual activities with that person during that time, and interacted frequently with that person during the relationship. The purpose of this injunction is to prevent the person from having contact with you.
If your situation doesn’t fit neatly into any of the above injunctions, then you may be able to file a repeat violence injunction. In order to qualify for this injunction, there must be at least two incidents of physical violence, threats of violence, or stalking and at least one of them occurred within the last six months. This most often occurs when individuals do not have a familial or romantic relationship and an injunction is needed.
Even more importantly, if the other party breaks the injunction, they may be violating Florida Law. Ultimately, the State Attorney’s Office may choose to prosecute the violator under Florida law. This provides the injunction an important deterrent effect since its violation can result in arrest. Many Sheriff’s Offices take these violations very seriously and investigate them very seriously.
Injunctions often are the only thing that provides folk’s safety and security from an abusive former partner. If you or someone you know has questions about Tampa injunctions, contact the Tampa injunction attorneys of Hackworth Law for a free case consultation. We have defended and prosecuted many injunctions and had great success throughout the Tampa Bay Area, including Pinellas, Polk and Hillsborough counties. We appreciate you taking the time out to check out our Tampa injunction attorney blog and we look forward to hearing from you.