Once again, I read an incredibly interesting article recently.

I have some questions. First of all, what exactly is psychological violence? I tried to track down a transcript of the speech referenced, but my Google-fu was not strong enough. As this is a policy that will eventually go into effect and not specifically drafted legislation at the moment, I can’t get the definition they’re using. So, I threw “psychological violence” into Google and returned a website from the Montreal Police Department (apparently the Canadians already have such laws) which had this definition: Psychological violence is an action or set of actions that directly impairs the victim’s psychological integrity.

I love broad definitions. They’re all kinds of fun. According to this, nearly all of us are responsible for psychological violence at some point in time. Certainly none would argue that pushing someone to fits of anger impairs their psychological integrity, but any strong emotion would do the same. If you’ve ever caused someone to love you, you’ve changed the balance of their psychological integrity, which may be perfectly fine for now but if it ever ends up in a situation where they would have been better of without you, that’s now an impairment.

This opens up a whole new world of crimes for me to commit. Say I don’t like one of my coworkers for whatever reason, and decide to use my position to make things more difficult for them. If it “impairs” them psychologically, I’ve now committed a crime. That’s absolutely wonderful. France is now looking into legislation to force serenity. I suppose we should just be glad that France is focusing only on psychological violence between couples, though. So, the only way you’d get arrested is if, in the middle of a fight with your significant other, you do something just to piss them off.

Sometimes, I’m glad I don’t live anywhere else.