Sharapova Daria Viktorovna The problems of assignment and performance of judicial psychological expertise of the underage victims of sex crimes

Abstract: This article is devoted to the problems of assignment and implementation of the judicial psychological expertise of the underage victims of sex crimes. Since the problems of sexual violence towards children are quite topical, the judicial psychological expertise on criminal cases of this type holds a special value. The author studied articles and publication on this issue, as well as the norms of the Criminal Procedural Code of the Russian Federation and the legal practice on the issue. The author discusses the following problems in this article: 1. The order of holding an expertise, depending on the age of a subject person is not differentiated in the CPC of RF. 2. There are no additional guarantees of protection of rights of underage persons when holding judicial psychological expertise, which allows for the use of procedures with no due regard to their physical and psychological specifics. 3. The legislation of the Russian Federation does not have any legal mechanisms, which would provide for the quality of judicial expertise, held by private (non-state) experts. 4. The investigator (the court) is guided by the inner conviction in their evaluation of the due capacity of an expert in the sphere of psychology of the underage persons. Often judicial psychological expertise is assigned to the person lacking competence in this specific sphere. 5. There is no normative provision for the list of necessary and permitted methods for the psychological expertise on cases, regarding sexual violence towards the underage persons, which leads to the use of variety of methods for the diagnostic studies. The author also provides for the possible solutions for these problems, including possible amendments into the criminal procedural legislation.

Keywords: