Usefulness is a number Iowa does not publish
The state can count the jail days. It does not count whether the order changed the next year.
A claim that these orders "make no difference at all" is stronger than the national evidence. A claim that Iowa has shown they work is stronger than anything Iowa publishes. Both claims fail. What remains is a deprivation with a mandatory jail term and no Iowa outcome line.
What a serious system would publish every year
| Count | Iowa publishes it? |
|---|---|
| Orders entered ex parte, after a hearing, and at initial appearance | No public series for chapter 236 or 664A |
| Orders denied, dismissed, or reversed on the assault predicate | Appellate opinions exist. No denominator. |
| Repeat police-reported assault within 12 months, split by temporary order, final order, and no order | Not published |
| Contempt findings, and how many were a call, a post, or an accidental contact | Not published |
| Firearm prohibitions, custody cases citing the filing, and appeals dismissed as moot | Not published |
| False-petition prosecutions besides the cases lawyers already know | Vileta is a case, not a rate |
House File 523, effective July 1, 2026, widened emergency orders. The bill did not add an outcome report. The direction of the last session was more orders, with the same silence on results. The 2026 regular session adjourned sine die on May 3. UEN.
The national evidence is small, split, and not about Iowa's criminal order
Dowling, Morgan, Hulme, Manning, and Wong, Australian Institute of Criminology, Trends & Issues 551 (June 2018), pooled four studies. People who received a protection order were less likely to be re-victimized (odds ratio 0.59, confidence interval 0.47–0.73). The authors say that magnitude is small by ordinary social-science standards, that the pool is too small to travel cleanly, and that more rigorous studies are required. Orders looked more useful when the protected person had fewer ties to the other person and more ability to live apart, and less useful when the restrained person already had a history of violence, crime, or mental-health trouble. DOI 10.52922/ti116237.
Holt and colleagues, JAMA 2002, is the study that separates the instruments. Permanent orders: less police-reported physical violence over twelve months (relative risk 0.2, interval 0.1–0.8). Temporary orders: more police-reported psychological abuse (relative risk 4.9 over twelve months, interval 2.8–8.6). JAMA. A related National Institute of Justice interview study of Seattle women found lower contact, injury, weapons threats, and abuse-related medical care among women who had orders, with the caution that women who seek orders differ — more often employed, married, pregnant, severely depressed, and already threatened. NIJ summary.
None of those studies is a measurement of Iowa Code § 664A.3, the mandatory criminal order entered at initial appearance, or of the seven-day contempt minimum. None is a measurement of an ex parte home exclusion that expires and then cannot be appealed.
The honest campaign sentence
Permanent orders have a small, contested association with less later physical violence. Temporary and mandatory criminal orders are the instruments with the missing hearing and, in the one study that isolated them, the harm signal. Iowa runs both without an outcome report.
That sentence is why repeal of every protective order is a bad bill, and why leaving chapter 664A untouched is also a bad bill. The cheapest lever keeps the permanent order that follows a real hearing, and it puts the four safeguards on the temporary and criminal orders that issue before one.