Gender inequality is the essential reason behind domestic violence against women, said a women's rights advocate on Sunday when commenting on a Chinese actor's physical abuse of his Japanese girlfriend which stirred controversy on social media.
Jiang Jinfu admitted online that he abused his Japanese girlfriend, hours after she posted photos of her bruised face on social media. The viral post on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, received more than 1.7 billion views with more than 234,000 comments as of press time.
Sunday marked the 19th International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, designated by the United Nations General Assembly.
Among the roughly 430 million families in China, a woman experiences domestic violence from her husband every 7.4 seconds, according to data provided by The Beijing News on Saturday.
About 30 percent of married Chinese women have suffered some form of physical abuse from intimate partners, while they normally called police only after 35 instances of abuse.
"Living with inequality for such a long time, many victims had no idea of their personal legal rights, even after their lives were put in danger… And thus they didn't defend themselves actively," Luo Ruixue, a member of the women's rights group Women Awakening Network, told the Global Times on Sunday.
Chinese courts have issued 2,154 personal safety protection orders to protect victims and those in danger from domestic violence, after the country's first law against domestic violence was enacted in March 2016, All-China Women's Federation reported in October.
The China Justice Big Data Institute under the Supreme People's Court reported that 15 percent of 2.5 million divorce proceedings closed in 2016 and 2017 were due to domestic violence, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday.
Between 2014 and 2016, there were 94,571 cases of first-instance reported crimes of domestic violence, but only less than 4 percent of them were finally treated as domestic violence, The Beijing News reported.
Difficulty in obtaining evidence could be an obstacle for similar cases, Nie Ling, a lawyer at Beijing Shaohemingdi Law Firm, told the Global Times.
Feng Yuan, a women's rights advocate and co-founder of Equality, a non-governmental organization that focuses on gender issues, told the Global Times that some judges' knowledge of domestic violence is not enough, and this has influenced their judgment in trials.
In a divorce case that went viral on Sunday, a court in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province approved a local woman resident's petition for personal safety protection order while repeatedly rejecting her divorce application, although she claimed she has been assaulted by her husband many times, short video platform WeVideo, under The Beijing News, reported
Zhang Yanbin, the judge of the case, said he did not approve the divorce, because he did not consider mentioned abuse as domestic violence, the video clip showed.
"Professional training is necessary for judges… Most judges are men who could be affected by the country's patriarchal cultural factors. Moreover, their inherent understanding of law terms, which has failed to keep pace with the times, could also be a factor that leads to the rare recognition of domestic violence," Feng said.
