You can accuse another person of battery if he or she attempts or strike you physically. Most people associate battery with physical fights and will seek personal injury damages if injured. However, there are other special cases of battery such as:

Toxic

The legal definition of battery is an intentional, unconsented, and harmful/offensive contact.  What you may not know here is that the intention mentioned in this definition is not an intention to cause harm, but an intention to carry out the act that ends up causing the harm.

Consider a case in which a chemical manufacturing company dumps its waste products into a local river instead of disposing of them as required by the law. The company may not have an intention of harming the residents who use the river's water, for example, to irrigate their farms. However, it may still face toxic battery charges if the chemicals end up harming someone. This is because it dumped the waste into the river knowingly, the residents did not consent to the harm, but they were harmed all the same.

Medical

As a patient, you have the right to consent and decline appropriate treatment, as long as your actions do not put other people's lives in jeopardy. Therefore, when a doctor treats you without your consent, then he or she is committing medical battery. Of course, this does not apply to nonemergency treatment because medical personnel are allowed to give emergency care without a patient's consent.

Note that you don't have to be injured by the doctor's intervention for you to have a medical battery claim. All that matters is that he or she touched you without your consent, and the touching offended you. For example, if you are taken to the theater for surgery in one part of the body, and the surgeon notices another problem (unrelated to the first) and acts on it, then his or her act may be considered medical battery.

Sports

If you play contact sports, then you do so knowing that you may be hurt, and you cannot bring personal injury claims against the person who caused the injury. However, you may be able to make an injury claim if the contact was intentional, unreasonably aggressive, and unrelated to the sports activity in which you were engaged. For example, in a baseball game, an intentional punch to the face would constitute sports battery.

Whenever you think that somebody has battered you, you should not take matters into own hands and confront him or her physically. That can only create more problems for you. Instead, consult a personal injury lawyer to see if you can level battery charges against him or her.

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