Clemente Díaz, Miguel ManuelPadilla Racero, DoloresEspinosa Breen, PabloReig Botella, AdelaGandoy Crego, Manuel2020-04-082020-04-082019Clemente, M., Padilla-Racero, D., Espinosa, P., Reig-Botella, A., & Gandoy-Crego, M. (2019). Institutional violence against users of the family law courts and the legal harassment scale. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00001http://hdl.handle.net/10347/21266The 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.eng© 2019 Clemente, Padilla-Racero, Espinosa, Reig-Botella and Gandoy-Crego. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Family lawLegal harassmentLegal systemScaleViolencejournal article10.3389/fpsyg.2019.000011664-1078open access