Domestic violence casts an ugly shadow(3)

Law and perception

Although the police contribute to that low success rate, they are not solely responsible for it.

"The marital law in China does not define domestic violence, so the police cannot decide which behavior falls into the category of domestic violence and which belongs to family disputes," said Chen Min, a researcher with the China Institute of Applied Jurisprudence of the Supreme People's Court of China.

"In the past, many people thought that domestic violence was a kind of family dispute and the public power had better stay out of it. Otherwise, intervention would possibly lead to divorce," she said.

"But now more and more people have realized domestic violence is a serious social problem and intervention by public power will maintain family stability by stopping the violence."

An example is the case of Dong Shanshan, a 26-year-old woman in Beijing who was beaten constantly by her husband. Dong and her parents called the police eight times, but the police were reluctant to intervene because they took such violence to be family disputes and the couple was still a family, said her attorney, Li Ying, director of the Yuanzhong Gender Development Center.

Finally, Dong died of internal organ failure in 2009 after a severe beating. Her husband was found guilty of abusing her and sentenced to six years, six months in prison.

"People's perception of domestic violence is the biggest challenge to solving the problem," Chen said.

By the end of 2010, the Supreme People's Court had picked 72 courts across China for a trial project on restraining domestic violence. The courts issued 48 orders of protection in 2010, forbidding the abusers to get close to the victims, their home and workplace, or to contact them. These orders of protection stopped the violence effectively and many women dropped their petitions for divorce.

Considering that domestic violence is often invisible outside the family and therefore difficult to prove, some legal experts have suggested that the court distribute the responsibility of raising evidence more evenly between the plaintiff and the defendant.

"As long as a victim can present evidence of injury and identify who caused it, the responsibility of raising evidence should be transferred to the defendant," Chen said.