Domestic Violence

Imagine this scenario: One day, you and your partner had a physical altercation, prompting you to call the police for help. They came but told you that your injuries were so minor. You refused to step down. In an unexpected turn, the officers told you to call your parents or adult children. How would you respond to such a situation? Instances like this happen daily in China’s twelve thousand urban police stations. The practice is commonly known as police mediation. My upcoming book When Law Says Little: China’s Morality-based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents (Oxford University Press, under contract) demystifies scenarios like this. When Law Says Little provides a constructivist grounded theory analysis of my 18-month ethnographic data collected in Northeast China, 57 hour-long police documentaries, and historiographic work from the 1950s to the present. Bringing the state, the police system, and individual officers into the limelight, I show how Chinese frontline police officers mediate non-criminal domestic violence incidents, given their strained resources and their heterogeneous constructions of domestic violence. It also explores how these mediation strategies align with China’s evolving social governance objectives.

My book makes both theoretical and methodological contributions. Theoretically, it reconstructs the concept of domestic violence. I redefine the parameters of “domestic” that constitute domestic violence by unearthing the physical or symbolic involvement of the couple’s parents and children in police mediation. Additionally, my work argues against a dichotomic view between the existing feminist framework, which conceptualizes domestic violence as violence against women, and the family violence framework, which understands domestic violence as gender-symmetrical interpersonal violence. Instead, I propose a gender-inclusive framework that recognizes the violent as well as the victimized experiences across genders. While acknowledging gender's pivotal role in examining domestic violence, this framework enables the integration of other factors to unpack and reform problematic domestic violence interventions in China and other societies. Methodologically, this book constructs an ecological analytical model with historical sensitivity by combining ethnographic, media, and archival data. This analytical model would be of enormous value to other scholars who intend to add temporal and spatial dimensions to their field data, especially those who study politically sensitive topics in authoritarian states.

When Law Says Little is structured into eight chapters (introduction and conclusion included) and a methodological appendix. I divide When Law Says Little into three primary sections. Chapters 1 and 2 demystify the heterogeneous constructions of domestic violence of the state, the police system, and the frontline police officers. Chapters 3 and 4 dive into the police mediation scenes where a gender-based and family-based morality facilitates the superficial reconciliation of a married couple but revictimizes the victim, particularly when the victim is a mother. The final two chapters pinpoint the other consequences of morality-based police mediation, illustrating the emotional torture it brings to the officers and how it aligns with the state’s social governance goals.

With the support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, I have drafted five chapters of the book by the end of 2023. It will appear as a new title in the “Interpersonal Violence” book series published by Oxford University Press.