L'évaluation médicolégale urgente des violences psychologiques après la loi du 9 juillet 2010

Within the fight against violence against women, the Act of 9th July 2010 created the offence of psychological violence which brings up two major difficulties relating to the materiality of the offence and how psychiatric nosology considers violence. On the one hand, the legal expert has to find the most relevant medical elements involved in the definition of the offence, despite the absence of a legal definition of psychological violence. On the other hand, the psychiatric nosology only recognizes effects of violence on mental health. An adaptation of the forensic examination of victims is required in order to a better assessment of personal inability: it means to value the impact of psychological violence on the ability to make the gestures of everyday life. Then, this adaptation depends on a modification of the mission conventionally entrusted to the legal expert, and specificity acquired by the medical examination itself. Thus, a typical mission has been developed to free ourselves from the subjective meanings given to psychological violence and from criminal qualification, which is not covered by the medical competence. The specificity of the medical examination relies on a collection of psychopathological data through a psychiatric clinical observation. However, the result of this evaluation process must avoid the pitfall of a correlation between personal inability and the existence or nature of a characterized psychiatric disease.