What Do Legal Needs Have to Do with Coping with Trauma?

"She failed to legal legal, which is legally legal, per legal." That's how a rapid-fire exchange between a magistrate and lawyer sounds to Alex, the protagonist in Netflix's hit series Maid.

In this particular episode, Alex appears at a custody hearing wearing clothes borrowed from the woman staying one floor above her at a domestic violence shelter. As she walks into the courtroom, Alex learns that her abusive partner has a lawyer; she does not. In a few brief moments of screen time, Maid shows how quickly and utterly survivors can be alienated in legal systems that have tremendous power over their lives. Over ten episodes, the series goes on to show how legal needs intersect with other basic needs – from housing and food to work and childcare – and psychological stress.

The series brought to the screen so much of what my psychology research team has learned from survivors of interpersonal traumas, such as sexual assault and intimate partner abuse, as well as victim service providers over the years: Unmet legal needs interact with psychological coping and healing.

Unmet Legal Needs After Interpersonal Traumas

Those lessons became especially clear in a collaboration with a Colorado-based organization, Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center. Our collaboration began years ago with an assessment designed to better understand the legal needs of crime victims in and around Denver as well as barriers to getting those needs met. The needs assessment quickly revealed that survivors faced a host of legal needs and barriers that were tangled up with social, economic, and health difficulties. For example, survivors described legal needs related to:

• Information about legal issues, such as needing to learn the difference between civil and criminal legal issues
• Criminal issues, such as enforcement of their rights as victims
• Civil issues, such as needing lawyers for divorce and custody proceedings or help obtaining protection orders
• Safety issues
• Housing instability
• Translational and interpretation
• Compensation, benefits, and bankruptcy

Survivors also told us about the stress that arose from trying to navigate legal issues and facing one barrier after another. In fact, we identified more than 50 common barriers to getting legal needs met from interviews and focus groups with survivors and victim service providers. Barriers ranged from the length of time that court proceedings took and technical challenges to accessing information about their cases to not being able to afford legal services or find private representation.

Based on this needs assessment, our research team developed a tool to help victim service providers spot legal issues. For example, an agency could include items from this tool in intake paperwork to spot pressing legal needs that might create additional barriers and burdens for clients. The tool is described in a research article here.

Taking Action to Build Community Resources

As a psychologist, I recognize the great progress made in recent years to bring attention to the psychological consequences of violence, such as posttraumatic stress disorder and depression, as well as to the need for access to psychological services. Through my team’s collaboration with organizations such as Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center and our work to understand legal needs, I've seen how survivors’ psychological well-being is tangled up with legal and other basic needs. Effectively responding to violence, then, has to involve community responses that connect survivors to different kinds of resources – psychological, legal, and social.

You can play a role in your community by learning what kinds of psychological and legal resources are available for survivors so that you’re ready to connect with people when they disclose violence – and advocating for resources that aren’t available.