Coercion with Morality: Chinese Police Officers’ Gendered Policing Strategies in Domestic Violence Cases

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15570851231164885
• Author: Wenqi Yang
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Feminist Criminology

2023, Vol. 18(3) 205–224

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/15570851231164885

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Coercion with Morality:

Chinese Police Off‌icers’

Gendered Policing Strategies

in Domestic Violence Cases

Wenqi Yang

1



Abstract

Scholars have established China’s pro-mediation policies in policing domestic violence

public security offense cases. However, the mediation process remains obscure. This

ethnographic study revealed that off‌icers adopted a gender-based morality to press

female and male victims into accepting mediation. Specif‌ically, the police moralized

victims’choices and urged male victims to forgive their wives to protect their mas-

culinity while asking female victims to forgive their husbands to protect their children’s

well-being. This work advances the scholarship on domestic violence intervention by

showing how such a gendered policing strategy disempowers victims of both genders

and results in another form of victim-blaming.

Keywords

domestic violence, intimate partner violence, police intervention, ethnography, China

China has penalized domestic violence crime since 1979, with the promulgation of its

f‌irst Criminal Law. However, responding to domestic violence non-criminal offenses,

or public security offenses (zhi’an anjian),

1

is a relatively new task added to police

1

Department of Sociology and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program, Grinnell College, Grinnell,

IA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Wenqi Yang, Department of Sociology and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program, Grinnell

College, 1226 Park Street, Humanities and Social Sciences Center N3126, Grinnell, IA 50112, United

States.

Email: yangwenq@grinnell.edu

off‌icers’workload. In 2001, the National People’s Congress, China’s highest legislative

body, amended the 1980 Marriage Law, establishing the police’s responsibilities in

non-criminal domestic violence cases (article 43). Specif‌ically, the police shall stop

domestic violence and give administrative punishment to the actor. The Anti-Domestic

Violence Law (2016) further delivers a range of new legal protections and introduces

forward-thinking prevention measures. Despite the legislative countermeasures, police

response to domestic violence remains problematic in that they are reported to mediate

most cases without punishing the assailants (e.g., Luo, 2018). Nevertheless, what

happens during police mediation remains underexplored. The present study f‌ills this

lacuna via a grounded theory analysis of ethnographic data on police mediation in

domestic violence public security violations.

Specif‌ically, taking both male-on-female and female-on-male domestic violence

into consideration, this research reveals that moral coercion has become a major

strategy off‌icers adopt to persuade victims of both genders to accept mediation as the

outcome of police intervention. Additionally, the f‌indings suggest that this kind of

strategy has a gendered nature and functions differently depending on the victim’s

gender. Finally, as one of the f‌irst ethnographic studies examining police mediation in

domestic violence incidents in China, this article also advances the scholarship on

domestic violence intervention by re-evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of

mediating domestic violence non-criminal cases.

In what follows, I f‌irst introduce domestic violence in China and its pro-mediation

policies in domestic violence public security offenses. Then I explicate the theoretical

framework at this article’s heart. After that, I detail the research methods that constitute

the empirical foundation of my analysis before presenting the ethnographic f‌indings.

Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the scholarly contribution, limita-

tions, and policy implications of this study.

Policing Domestic Violence in China

The legislative changes reviewed at the beginning of this article led scholars to ask: do

most assailants of domestic violence receive administrative sanctions as required by the

statutes? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Researchers found that Chinese police of-

f‌icers are primarily reluctant to investigate domestic violence cases and apply ad-

ministrative punishment against the perpetrators (Zhao et al., 2018). For instance, the

police department in Shenzhen handled 8,990 domestic violence cases between April

2016 and January 2018. Among the cases, only 49 (0.5%) and 27 (0.3%) perpetrators

received administrative or criminal sanctions, respectively (Luo, 2018). If adminis-

trative punishment is rare, then how do police off‌icers handle these cases? It turns out

they mediate the majority of domestic violence public security offenses (Sun et al.,

2011). Although the police department in Fish Town (a pseudonym) in Heilongjiang

province, my f‌ieldwork site, has not publicized related data, statistics from Liaoning

province, one of the other two provinces in Northeast China, give us a hint of the

situation. The police in Liaoning reported receiving 18,169 domestic violence cases

206 Feminist Criminology 18(3)