Protection violations occurs when a machine instruction tries to execute and is found to be illegal in the context of the currently running process. There are two classes of protection violation, general and COBOL protections violations.
Your COBOL development system is thorough in preventing or trapping potentially illegal code. However, it is still possible for your programs to generate code that is illegal in some way, and when this happens the error might be trapped as a general protection violation by the operating system or a COBOL protection violation by this COBOL system.