LAUSR

Family violence has been among the most multifaceted phenomena across countries and regions (Tang & Lai, 2008). China, a conventionally male-dominated society, is no exception. Starting from the late 1970s, China implemented the Open Door economic policy. Accompanying the rapid economic growth since then, women’s social status has gained significant improvements. For example, the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Bejing, the capital city of China, in 1995. The Conference passed a declaration to empower women and to advance gender equality. Women nowadays are believed to be able to hold up colloquially “half of the sky.” Nevertheless, family violence in greater China remains an understudied area of research. In mainland China, for instance, the All China Women’s Federation (2011) revealed in 2011 that approximately one quarter of married women had experienced family violence of various kinds. The first Anti-domestic Violence Law (hereafter called the Law) that specifically deals with family violence, however, was not passed until December 2015. The Law officially came into effect on March 1, 2016. Although the Law marks a significant milestone for protection of victims in family violence, its effects remain unknown. A recently published report on court cases concerning family violence in Beijing city reveals a total of 320 court verdicts (including civil, criminal, and administrative cases) between March 1, 2016 and the end of February, 2021. There was an average of only 64 verdicts per year. The number of verdicts reached 200 (62.5%) in 2016, the year that the Law came into effect. It then dropped dramatically to less than 60 cases per year starting in 2017. There was only one verdict during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (Beijing Yuanzhong Family & Community Development Service Center, 2021). Nationwide court statistics reveal similar findings suggesting that family violence has not been given enough attention by the Chinese criminal justice system. Between 2014 and 2016, Chinese courts of various levels reported having handled 94,571 first-instance divorce cases claiming to involve family violence. Notably, only 3,741 (3.96%) cases were later affirmed to have involved family violence (Wei, 2017). As with court case statistics, empirical research on family violence published in the Chinese language is also limited. While Chinese scholars paid increasing attention to family violence in 2016, this attention quickly faded (Zhang et al., 2019). A recently published scoping review on intimate partner violence (IPV) used “intimate partner violence,” “family violence,” “spousal violence,” and “marital violence” as keywords to search all published empirical and quantitative journal articles in Chinese. This search resulted in only 68 articles published between 1982 and 2018 (Zhang et al., 2019), with increasing numbers of studies published in the last two decades. According to Zhang et al. (2019), most of these studies were not rigorously designed. Moreover, the published studies mainly reported on univariate descriptive statistics and bivariate comparisons of group means. Despite a rise in the number of studies published in Chinese, overall, the findings from this recent scoping review suggest that empirical research on family and intimate partner violence remains limited in both range and depth. Different results have been found, however, among relevant articles published in internationally-recognized academic journals in English. The guest editors conducted a preliminary article search using “family violence” and “China” as keywords (for topics) in the Web of Science Core * Ruohui Zhao [email protected]