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.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This research examines the relationship between dark triad and the use that some parents make of their children in order to attack the other parent after a couple break-up. We examined whether parents who are willing to lie about issues concerning the other parent and their children during a couple break-up process show higher levels of dark triad traits. Across two different samples of divorced participants (N = 1085 and N = 249), we measured dark triad traits and willingness to engage in judicial manipulation. The objective of this study was to build a judicial manipulation scale to measure willingness to lie and use children to harm the other parent that could be used in professional practice. Results show significant correlations for judicial manipulation and dark triad traits and confirm the psychometric properties of reliability and validity of a proposed scale. We found that dark triad traits are adequate indicators of judicial manipulation. We discuss the importance of the scale to help the judicial system to determine which parent is the most appropriate to be designated as the legal custodial parent.