Like you I have no time for those who are guilty of domestic violence (and neither has Scott I'm sure), but unless the man being accused has the opportunity to defend himself how can you not have thrown away the "innocent until proven guilty" provision we used to feel all men and women deserved?
If the restraining order request was really being applied for simply to remove a perfectly good father from his children's lives shouldn't that be a crime against both the father and his child?
In the UK a mother called Sally Clark was wrongly convicted of harming her own babies (found guilty of killing two of them when they were each under a year old, though vital evidence for the defence was withheld, such as the fact there had been evidence of an infection which could have been the cause of death in at least one of the children).
I mention her case because I suspect that the imprisonment she suffered for three years before the truth came out, and the exclusion she had to put up with from her remaining child were probably less devastating to her than losing her two children. The poor woman has died subsequently at the age of about forty, and maybe had lost the will to live many people think, even though her remaining child had been returned to her (she didn't dare to be left in the same room with him alone in case she was accused again of harming her child).
There has been a huge outcry about the injustice she suffered (although I hate to say it - no one will ever know for sure what happened to the two babies thaat died). However, given the choice, I guess the poor woman would have chosen jail if only she could have brought her children back to life.
I hope I've made my point now, that by allowing exclusions of perfectly good parents on false accusations you are probably inflicting upon them a punishment as bad in its own way as happened to this woman, but you are also allowing it to be done on a huge scale. People argue about how widespread the practise is but lets speculate it must still be in the many thousands - many thousands of "Sally Clark" equivalent scale of injustices (- sorry to use her name like that but how would you like a similar fate yourself?).
Scott is kicking himself for not doing more, but if the two women he's referring to had denied his evidence, or the judge had doubted his understanding of what they were saying or worse still felt he had an ulterior motive for making it all up, then he could have faced charges of perjury for speaking out himself. He didn't know the fathers concerned in these cases, maybe they had "deserved" their fate as far as exclusion from their children on other grounds (maybe they didn't give a damn about them for example, and the women were just making sure they didn't get the chance to hassle them again).
I suspect he would have needed at least one other witness to the conversation to testify as to what was said before he would have been believed so maybe he did the right thing keeping quiet (he's got his own life to lead and that's hard enough isn't it without thinking you can correct every wrong in the world around you).
I hope you don't feel my logic is too flawed - put yourself in the shoes of those falsely accused and then tell us whether you would like such a law applied to you - tyranny results from these kinds of injustices don't you think?
All the best, Graham
P.S. I hope you get the chnace to reply before the new month filing comes alomg to stop you!