“In terms of intra-family violence, judicial specialization is necessary”

Mmagistrates for thirty years, heads of courts on numerous occasions, we have been leading innovative judicial policies for years to fight against intra-family violence (VIF) in the courts as well as in the courts of appeal. We have seen the judiciary seize on this societal issue and its legal developments. Better training in the concepts: influence, psycho-trauma, over-murder, traumatic forgetting, coercive control. But also to question the principles: the presumption of innocence, the prescription, the regime of proof and the classifications without follow-up.

Committed, the prosecutors dedicate a significant part of their permanence to intra-family violence, the correctional courts condemn every day in immediate appearance, the judges of application of the sentences follow hundreds of authors and warn the victims of their exit.

Creative, when they seize laws blurring the boundaries between civil and criminal, asking the family court judge to rule on probable violence and the criminal judge to rule on parental authority, judges adapt .

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Active, the courts have been able to hire specific contractual agents and set up watch cells, feedback on feminicides, mechanisms for sharing information between the courts, law enforcement and associations. However, it is clear, five years after #metoo and three years after the Grenelle, that the results are not up to the collective mobilization: in 2022, 112 feminicides were identified.

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The Committee of the Estates General of Justice, in July, titled its report “Giving justice to citizens”. He thinks it necessary to “restore confidence in justice by opening up the institution and its ability to question itself by dialoguing with society and the public authorities”. The fight against domestic violence is the ideal terrain for this dialectic. We believe that we must respond to social demand by changing methods and tools.

New perimeter

It is first of all the logic of judicial treatment that needs to be reinterpreted. What renders justice blind is the intervention of magistrates, seized in civil and criminal cases, over the course of events: divorce/judge in family affairs; report of a child in danger/juvenile judge; violence/criminal judge; follow-up of the convict/sentence enforcement judge. It is a question of modifying this functioning, which partitions competences.

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