If someone will not leave you alone, a harassment injunction is the order that makes them stop. It is a civil order, made by the High Court or the county court under section 3 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. It can tell the person not to contact you, require them to delete what they have posted, and keep your name out of the court record while it does so. Breaking it is a criminal offence carrying up to five years in prison. Where a case is urgent, we can be in front of a judge within a day or two.
Most people who ask us about injunctions have already tried everything that was supposed to work. They blocked the account and a new one appeared the same week. They reported it and were told it was a civil matter. They asked the person to stop, and it got worse. This article is about the point where you stop asking and a court tells them instead.
What an injunction does to the person harassing you
It takes the decision out of their hands. Until the order exists, stopping is something you have been asking them to choose. After it, carrying on is a criminal offence, and the choice they are making is whether to risk their liberty over it.
That is the part people underestimate. A solicitor's letter is a warning from your side of the argument, and someone who has convinced themselves they are in the right can tell themselves it is bluster. An order has a judge's name on it. If they breach it, we can apply to a judge of the same court for a warrant for their arrest. Breaching an order made under section 3 of the 1997 Act, without reasonable excuse, is also a criminal offence. It carries up to five years' imprisonment on conviction on indictment. In our experience that lands with people who had stopped listening to anything else.
An injunction does not ask someone to stop. It takes the choice away from them, and puts what happens next in the hands of a judge rather than yours.
What the order can cover
The order says what the person may not do, in terms specific enough that there is no argument later about whether they have broken it. In the harassment cases we handle it tends to prohibit any contact with you, direct or indirect, which includes messages sent through other people and accounts opened under new names. It can require named posts, pages, videos or whole websites to be taken down within a stated period, and it can prohibit publishing anything further about you at all, which is the part that stops a campaign simply resuming somewhere else.
Where the harassment has an offline side, the order can create an exclusion zone around your home, your work or your children's school. Where publicity would make things worse, we ask at the same time for an order anonymising your name, so that going to court does not spread the very thing you are trying to contain. And we sometimes ask for an order requiring the person to identify every account they have used, which is how the remaining material gets found.
What you need to show
Two incidents and a reasonable person. That is the short answer, and the rest is detail.
Harassment under the Act needs a course of conduct, and section 7 says that means conduct on at least two occasions. Conduct includes speech, and harassment includes alarming you or causing you distress, so a pattern of messages counts even where no single one of them would. A single post, however vile, is usually not enough on its own.
What the person says they meant by it does not decide the question. The test is whether a reasonable person with the same information would think the conduct amounted to harassment. That matters because the commonest response we see is that it was a joke, or a warning to others, or that they were only telling the truth.
You do not always have to wait for the worst of it. Section 3 covers an apprehended breach as well as one that has already happened, so a credible threat to publish can be enough to get you in front of a judge.
The person may say their conduct was reasonable, or that they were acting to prevent or detect crime, which are defences under section 1(3). The Supreme Court held in Hayes v Willoughby [2013] UKSC 17 that anyone relying on the crime prevention defence has to have thought rationally about whether what they were doing was justified, which is why it rarely helps the person on a personal campaign. Where the order would stop something being published, a higher threshold applies under section 12(3) of the Human Rights Act 1998: the court needs to be satisfied that you are likely to establish at trial that publication should not be allowed.
How it works, from your first call to the order
Evidence comes first, and it comes before the other side knows you have instructed anyone. We preserve the posts, the messages, the pages and the account details, with their dates and links, because material that disappears the week before a hearing cannot be recovered afterwards and the judge only sees what we can put in front of them.
If you do not know who the person is, that is the next job rather than a reason to give up. Our open-source intelligence team works on identifying them, and where that is not enough we apply for Norwich Pharmacal orders for social media. Our guide to exposing internet trolls explains how that work is done.
In most cases we then send a solicitor's letter to stop harassment before going anywhere near a court. A good number of matters end there, for a fraction of the cost, and where the letter is ignored it has still done you a favour, because it shows the judge that the person was told plainly and carried on.
The application itself is a claim form, an application notice, a witness statement and a draft of the order we want the judge to make. The wording of that draft is the part that decides whether the order is worth having. We normally give the other side notice, and the rules expect at least three clear days of it. Where telling them first would mean the material goes up immediately, or the evidence disappears, we can apply without notice instead. Our page on obtaining an emergency injunction covers that route.
The hearing is usually short. You will normally be asked to promise the court to pay the other side's losses if the order turns out to have been wrongly granted. In a harassment case that is a small exposure, because a person told to stop harassing loses nothing of value. Once the order is served, most cases settle rather than going to trial, typically on undertakings given to the court.
What we see on the other side of this
Two kinds of call reach our Soho office about injunctions. The first is from someone who has been living with it for a year or more, has a folder of screenshots they cannot bear to look at again, and has been told by several people that there is nothing to be done. The second comes at nine in the evening from someone who has just been sent a photograph of themselves with a demand attached, and who has not slept.
The first group are usually surprised by how quickly it can move once somebody takes hold of it. The second are surprised that a court will sit at all at that hour. Both tend to say the same thing afterwards, which is that the relief was less about the order itself than about no longer being the only person dealing with it.
Cases where we obtained injunctions
These are matters we acted in. Identifying details have been changed in the anonymised accounts.
An injunction served through Instagram
Our client was targeted by an anonymous Instagram account that would not stop and could not be traced by the usual routes. We obtained an injunction and persuaded the court to allow service through the platform itself, the first time that had been done in England and Wales. Read about serving an injunction via Instagram.
Four websites attacking a former manager
A former temporary interpreter at the International Maritime Organisation built four websites about his former manager, using photographs taken without her consent. He ignored our letter, so we applied under the 1997 Act. Mr Justice Cranston granted the injunction and ordered the sites deleted. Read about a harassment injunction following online harassment of a former employer.
A privacy injunction obtained alongside the harassment claim
Where private information is being published as part of the harassment, we ask for a privacy injunction at the same time, commonly with an order anonymising our client so the proceedings do not spread the material further. Read our privacy injunction case study, and more of our online harassment case studies.
What it costs
A first consultation is charged at a fixed, all-inclusive fee of £469. After it we give you a written estimate for each step, so that you decide stage by stage. Book a consultation with an online harassment solicitor.
After the consultation you get a written estimate for each stage, so you decide step by step rather than committing to a whole case at the start. Our page on harassment injunction cost sets out the ranges and how to budget across them, and in some cases we can act on a no win no fee basis once we have assessed the prospects. You can read more about how we act for victims on our harassment solicitors page.
What you can realistically expect
Where the evidence is in order and we know who the person is, an interim order can be in place within days, and in an urgent case within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Most contested matters then end with undertakings to the court rather than a trial, which is quicker and a good deal cheaper for you.
Damages can be awarded alongside the order, for the anxiety the harassment caused as well as any money you have lost. Awards in harassment cases tend to sit between the low thousands and the low tens of thousands of pounds. In Hourani v Thomson [2017] EWHC 432 (QB) the High Court awarded £30,000 for harassment in a case involving a sustained campaign, including demonstrations and online material.
Two limits are worth knowing before you start. A claim under section 3 is not caught by the three-year limit that applies to personal injury claims, because section 11(1A) of the Limitation Act 1980 disapplies it, so the ordinary six-year period for a claim in tort applies instead. And an order does not make the internet forget. It stops the person and compels them to delete what they control; anything copied elsewhere needs separate work with the platforms and the search engines.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get an injunction for harassment?
You bring a civil claim under section 3 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and apply for an interim injunction inside it. The application needs a claim form, an application notice, a witness statement setting out the facts and a draft of the order you want. A court can hear it within days, and the same day where the matter is urgent.
How long does it take to get a harassment injunction?
In an urgent case an order can be obtained within twenty-four to forty-eight hours of instructions, and sometimes faster. Where it is not urgent, the rules expect the other side to have at least three clear days' notice of the hearing, so a fortnight from instructions to order is a fair expectation once the evidence is gathered.
What is the difference between a harassment injunction and a restraining order?
A harassment injunction is a civil order you apply for and control. A restraining order is made by a criminal court, either on sentence or, in some circumstances, after an acquittal, and it is the prosecution rather than you who drives it. A civil injunction does not depend on the police charging anyone.
Can I get an injunction if I do not know who is harassing me?
In many cases, yes. We would try to identify the person first, through our open-source intelligence work and, where that is not enough, disclosure orders against the platform. Where identification is not possible, a claim can be brought against a defendant described by their conduct, provided the description is precise enough, and the court can allow service by another method.
What happens if someone breaches a harassment injunction?
You can apply for a warrant for their arrest, and breaching the order without reasonable excuse is a criminal offence under section 3(6) of the 1997 Act, carrying up to five years' imprisonment on conviction on indictment. The same conduct cannot be both punished as a contempt of court and prosecuted.
Do I have to tell the harasser before I apply?
Normally the rules expect at least three clear days' notice. Where there is good reason not to give it, the application can be made without notice. That might be because warning the person would lead to evidence being destroyed, or to the material being published immediately. The court then fixes a return date at which the other side can attend.
Will my name be made public if I apply for a harassment injunction?
Not necessarily. Where publicity would defeat the purpose of the application, a court can anonymise the parties and restrict what may be reported. We ask for that at the same time as the injunction where the case calls for it.
How long does a harassment injunction last?
An interim order made with both sides present can be expressed to last until trial or further order. One made without notice lasts until the return date, a week or two later. A final injunction made at the end of the case can be indefinite.