Before it became Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year, I knew “gaslighting” was a good word for my book: Chapter 7, “How Judges Gaslight Domestic Violence Victims in Divorce Trials” pbs.org/newshour/arts/…
#2 “Profoundly at odds with the legal meaning of domestic violence and female abuse victims’ own understandings of what brought them to court were the revisionist, gaslighting narratives of their husbands, their family members, and judges.”
#3 “Judges discursively transformed what plaintiffs understood as intolerable and unlawful abuse constituting grounds for divorce into innocent misunderstandings and mistakes on the part of caring husbands, and in so doing gaslighted plaintiffs…
#4 …by calling into question their sense of reality (Sweet 2019). In response to a plaintiff’s request for a divorce on the grounds of ‘the defendant’s ceaseless physical abuse and domestic violence,’ the defendant responded by stating, …
#5 …‘I was not calm enough, truly did beat her, and regret what I did; no matter what, it is wrong to hit people, and I admit my mistake.’ In its holding, the court declared: ‘The defendant is sincere about repenting, mending his ways, …
#6 …and putting an absolute end to heated behavior. … The plaintiff’s grounds for divorce do not meet the statutory requirement stipulated by the Marriage Law that mutual affection has broken down, …
#7 …and the court therefore denies support of the plaintiff’s petition’ (Decision #1575160, Luohe Municipal Shaoling District People’s Court, Henan Province, July 28, 2015).”
Case ID (2015)召民二初字232号, archived at perma.cc/YMH3-ECQG.
We should remember that Hu Jintao tried to fix some of the stuff Jiang Zemin broke. Hu eliminated agricultural taxes and most school tuition/fees, and introduced a number of rural social welfare programs.
#2 This chapter I wrote for a book edited by @Dali_Yang contains results of a survey conducted in the same 23 villages in 2002 (the very end of the Jiang Zemin era) and 2010 (towards the end of the Hu Jintao era).
#3 Respondents reported a dramatic improvement in their economic conditions, investment in public goods, and relations with village cadres.
When I give talks on Zoom, I try to get a copy of the chat transcript to see reactions. Here are some examples from book talks I’ve given over the past year. #DomesticViolence
- “…This is so fucked up…”
- “what a joke” 也太搞笑了
- “my blood pressure has risen” 血压上来了
1/7
- “God, so sad” 天,好难过
- “So hopeless…it’s like this and you still can’t get divorced” 好绝望……这样还不让离婚嘛
- “Truly horrible, this is always the logic of denying divorce petitions” 真的太惨了,不判离婚的逻辑永远都是那一套
2/7
- “the plight of women is always ignored” 女性的处境始终是视而不见
- “beating up your wife and kids is no problem, much less beating up a judge” 打老婆孩子都能下得了手,打法官更不在话下
3/7
Big news: China’s divorce rate plummeted in 2021 to its lowest level in over a decade. The blue and red lines in this figure from a Ministry of Civil Affair report show crude divorce and marriage rates respectively. 1/9
My new book is about China’s ongoing judicial clampdown on divorce. China’s precipitously declining divorce rate shows that the clampdown on divorce has extended from courts to the Civil Affairs Administration. 2/9
In China, people can divorce in two places: (1) courts and (2) marriage registration offices in local Civil Affairs Bureaus. Civil Affairs divorces became much easier following new regulations passed in 2003. 3/9