Dealing with complaints of domestic violence is a complex problem. The state is obliged to protect the safety of residents and the complaint therefore requires it to distinguish between the suspect of an offense and its reporter in order to prevent further violence, before all the details are clarified. In the case of a complaint of domestic violence, this means exclusion from the house and children, which is to say a severe blow against suspect before his guilt is proven, and often before any evidence is found to support the charges against him apart from the complaint itself. Besides, as a rule, domestic violence occurs in the home, without the presence of independent witnesses, making it difficult to investigate the complaint or reject it in the absence of conclusive evidence either way. Add to this the impact of changes made under the State Attorney’s Office Guideline 2.5,[4] under which the prosecution and the police cannot be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution in cases of false complaints of domestic violence.[5] One should also take into account the possible consequences of such a complaint on divorce proceedings, particularly on the attempt of domestic violence suspects to win parental status and visitation with the children.
In the situation that has been created, filing a false complaint of domestic violence seriously and immediately harms the suspect, is difficult to disprove, and even if it is determined that the complaint is false and and there is a reasonable suspicion that it was filed maliciously – the complainant will almost certainly not be investigated. We believe that this state of affairs requires the authorities to prepare for the possibility that a complaint may be false and to determine appropriate procedures for handling false complaints.
Preparations for the Treatment of False Complaints
It is almost impossible to know the scope of the phenomenon of false complaints of domestic violence. In the first place, it is difficult to collect reliable data and the politicization of the issue leads to the publication of unreliable results obtained by questionable research methods. We do not want to engage in a debate about the extent of the phenomenon – the damage caused to suspects due to such false complaints is so severe that we believe each case deserves attention.
Guideline 2.5 of the State Attorney’s Office has been changed to encourage domestic violence victims to complain to the police.[6] And reading the articles as written, it is possible to conclude that their purpose was to protect complainants who filed justifiable complaints and then withdrew them,[7] but the interpretation accepted by the prosecution is that we should not investigate suspected false complaints at all. Changes that were added in response to this interpretation recommending criminal investigation of false complaints intended to harm the suspect did not sufficiently affect the conduct of the police and prosecution in practice.
You can not right a wrong by doing wrong to someone else. The desire to protect victims of domestic violence and encourage them to complain to the police cannot come at the expense of the victims of false complaints. A person who suffers a false complaint is severely harmed and is as worthy of state protection as any other citizen. Besides, we should treat any attempt to harness state institutions to harm an innocent man with severity. State authorities, the police in particular, must take action against those who make malicious false complaints.
Because the police and the prosecution insist on hiding behind a broad interpretation of the changes made under the Guideline 2.5 and ignoring the changes that were added to it later in order to rule out this interpretation, we must eliminate these changes to Guideline 2.5 of the State Attorney’s Office and issue clear instructions regarding prosecution and police, according to which a well-founded suspicion of a false complaint would be grounds to open a criminal investigation.