A court order telling one person to stop contacting or coming near another - enforceable by police, and valid across state lines.
A protective order is a civil court order restricting what one person may do in relation to another: typically prohibiting contact, requiring them to stay away from a home, workplace or school, and sometimes requiring them to leave a shared residence. Terminology varies by state - protective order, restraining order, order of protection, injunction against harassment - and the differences are more than cosmetic, because states attach different grounds and different consequences to each type.
Most states operate two stages. An emergency or temporary order can often be obtained quickly, sometimes the same day and without the other person present, on the applicant's account alone. It lasts only until a hearing, at which both sides appear and the court decides whether to issue a longer order. The second hearing is the one that decides the outcome, and it is the one where evidence matters.
Two consequences are routinely underestimated. First, breaching a protective order is generally a criminal offence in its own right, separate from whatever the original conduct was - which is what gives the order practical force. Second, a qualifying order can trigger a federal firearms prohibition on the person restrained. That is federal law operating automatically on top of the state order, not something the state judge has to add.
These orders are also civil rather than criminal proceedings, which means the applicant does not need a prosecutor and does not need the police to have charged anyone. A person can seek one whether or not any criminal case exists.
The hearing is the point at which help matters most, because temporary orders are comparatively easy to obtain and final ones are decided on evidence with the other side present and often represented. Domestic violence legal services and legal aid programmes handle these routinely and frequently at no cost, and many courts have an advocate available on site. If there is a parallel custody, divorce or criminal case, the orders interact in ways that are difficult to manage separately - that is the situation in which advice is worth most.
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