Mouvement pour l'Égalité entre les Femmes et les Hommes
Struggle for recognition of forced suicide
Guidance devices for frontline professionals.
Know, orient and perform psychological autopsy.
Definition of forced suicide
What is forces suicide ?
“Ultimate act of a victim of psychological, and sometimes physical, domestic violence.”
“Forced suicide” is the name given to situations where women are victims of the psychological violence of their partner and kill themselves, led to this by manipulation and control, and by the suffering they experience. But to date, no law really allows to seek the responsibility of the perpetrators of psychological violence as for other voluntary violence, except in France.
The families of the victims of «forced suicides» therefore face a wall. And the victims remain invisible.
Without psychic preparation to submit it, no woman would accept physical domestic violence. It is this psychic preparation, this psychological pressure, this verbal violence creating a situation of domination, which leads to the moral destruction of a being, then to physical violence, and unfortunately too often, to death.
This process of control leads the victim to an alteration of his capacity for judgment, which leads him to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable. The victim is then unable to name what he is experiencing, what he can tolerate or not. The traumatic consequences are considerable: a real identity rupture takes place.
“Without control, without psychological violence, physical violence cannot exist.”
Complaints of violence most often involve a specific scene of physical and moral violence taken from the context: a slap, a blow, a threat, an insult. This scene tells a story, a life made of insults, denigrations, humiliations, harassment, isolation, pressure, blackmail. Physical violence within the couple is the visible symptom of its cement, its base: the grip. When there is physical violence, there is inevitably, systematically psychological violence, a hold.
When the victim:
Has been deprived of his free will;
That these capacities of judgment have been altered;
That all his psychic resistances will have yielded;While his instinct for survival will have disappeared, at the same time as his illusions;That his appeals for help have not been heard;
When suffering has invaded every part of his being;
To get out of this mental prison, suicide may be the only solution to escape this hell and regain freedom.When language becomes violence, too, it can lead to death.
“If the physical consequences of violence are easy to spot, the most serious are psychological and they have serious consequences on the future of the woman. The traces of physical aggression eventually fade, while insults and humiliations leave indelible marks.”
- MARIE-FRANCE HIRIGOYEN
This is what forced suicide is all about. It is about:
- Identify women victims of physical and moral violence in their relationship as a couple. This violence can be psychological, physical or both. - Some of these women can commit suicide.
- the need to recognize those who committed psychological violence as directly responsible for the suicide of victims. In other words, responsible for their deaths.
« Forced suicide » is when someone kills himself because of the repeated humiliation or violence of his spouse. A new law must be created to punish this. This choice of words may have shocked legal experts who attach importance to precision of terms. Forced suicide » means a deliberate will to kill oneself, a method of execution by threatening a worse evil than self-inflicted death.
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