Definition of forced suicide: Last act of a victim of psychological, and sometimes physical, domestic violence

What is forced suicide?

“Forced suicide” is the name given to situations where women are victims of the psychological violence of their partner and kill themselves, driven to this by manipulation and control, and by the suffering that they experience. But to date, no law really makes it possible to seek the responsibility of the perpetrators of psychological violence as for other intentional violence, except in France. The families of the victims of “forced suicides” therefore come up against a wall. And the victims remain invisible.

Without a psychic preparation intended to subdue her, no woman would accept physical conjugal 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 alas too often, to death.

This process of influence causes the victim to alter his judgment abilities, which leads him to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable. The victim then finds himself unable to name what he is experiencing, what he can tolerate or not. The traumatic consequences are considerable: there is a real break in identity.

“Without influence, without psychological violence, physical violence cannot exist.”

Complaints for violence most often relate to a specific scene of physical and moral violence taken from the context: a slap, a blow, a threat, an insult. However, this scene tells a story, a life made up of insults, denigration, humiliation, harassment, isolation, pressure, blackmail. Physical violence within the couple is the visible symptom of its cement, its base: influence. When there is physical violence, there is necessarily, systematically psychological violence, a grip.

When the victim:

Will have been deprived of his free will;

That these judgment abilities will have been impaired;

That all his psychic resistances will have yielded;

Even though his instinct for survival will have disappeared, along with his illusions;

That his cries for help will not have been heard;

When suffering has invaded every part of his being;

To get out of this mental prison, this invisible incarceration, suicide, death, will be the only solution to get out of this hell, and perhaps even the last of his freedoms.

When language becomes violence, it too can lead to death.

“While the physical consequences of violence are easy to spot, the most serious are psychological and they have serious consequences on the future of women. The traces of a physical aggression eventually fade away, while insults and humiliations leave indelible marks.”
- Marie‐France Hirigoyen

This is precisely forced suicide. It is :

  • the need to recognize women who commit suicide as a result of physical and moral violence within the couple, whether this violence is psychological, physical or both;
  • the need to recognize those who committed psychological violence as directly responsible for the suicide of the victims. In other words: responsible for their death.

“Forced suicide” here means suicide caused by the repeated humiliation or violence of a spouse, for which a new incrimination must be created. This choice of terms may have offended the jurist attached to the rigor of words and formulations since “forced suicide” refers to a perfectly voluntarist approach to killing, a method of execution by threat of an evil worse than self-death. -inflicted.

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