Abstract
The term harassment is often used to refer two contexts, the workplace and school, but not the legal system itself. Long drawn-out litigation in the Family Law Courts often produces a surreptitious phenomenon of violence toward one of the litigating parties, who become victims of the legal system itself. The aim of this study was to determine whether legal harassment could be detected and measured in the Spanish Justice System using an innovative Legal Harassment Scale (LHS). This hypothesis was substantiated by the data obtained using a new 32-item psychometric instrument with a global index: the LHS, consisting of four factors: Direct Aggression, Procedural Harassment, Personal Contempt, and Manipulation of Reality. The estimated reliability and validity of the LHS was satisfactory, both in terms of the global score, and for each of the four factors distributed along the normal curve. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the limitations of the study and in relation to future lines of research aimed at ensuring that the legal system respects and safeguards the rights of the parties involved in litigation, and that no party falls victim to legal harassment.
Highlights
What is legal harassment? Legal harassment or abuse was defined by Vollans (2010, p. 5) as follows: “Court-related abuse and harassment is the use of ongoing litigation through judicial and quasijudicial systems to continue to harass and abuse.” This abuse can affect all parents and is often focused on legal proceedings involving custody issues
The aim of this study was to determine whether legal harassment could be detected and measured in the Spanish Justice System using an innovative Legal Harassment Scale (LHS)
The current study develops a new scale to measure a specific type of harassment, legal harassment, which injures parties involved in custody litigation
Summary
What is legal harassment? Legal harassment or abuse was defined by Vollans (2010, p. 5) as follows: “Court-related abuse and harassment is the use of ongoing litigation through judicial and quasijudicial systems to continue to harass and abuse.” This abuse can affect all parents and is often focused on legal proceedings involving custody issues. 5) as follows: “Court-related abuse and harassment is the use of ongoing litigation through judicial and quasijudicial systems to continue to harass and abuse.”. This abuse can affect all parents and is often focused on legal proceedings involving custody issues. Few studies have examined this context, yet many of the users of the justice system feel victimized by the system itself, either as plaintiff or defendant, though the effect of harassment is often more acute in the former. There are disadvantaged groups, who are scorned both by society and the justice system (Athwal and Burnett, 2014). Members of specific alienated groups, primarily submerged in the underground economy, are “disappearing” due to low-level harassment
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