The nationwide domestic violence legislation is expected to pass in China within the next year. However, this legislation will not necessarily cover gay couples who are cohabitating, as gay marriage is not recognized in China. We talk to Li Yue and Wangshu at Common Language about their advocacy work towards making nationwide domestic violence legislation LGBT inclusive.

“We focus on sexual orientation and gender identity expression and rights in China, but predominantly focus on LBTI, which is Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex. We have a very strong gender equality focus in our LBTI movement,” said Wangshu, a member of the organization, describing this grassroots organization.

“We started as a grassroots community-based organization and gradually shifted into advocacy work. We have quite a strong legal focus but are also in touch with the community, we provide a lot of capacity building and technical support to LBTI community based organizations around China. At the moment, we are engaging with legal experts who are drafting the domestic legislation law.”

Domestic violence among China’s LBTI community
Common Language’s work is highly necessary, as their research on domestic violence surprised even them. “When we finished our research, we realized that almost 70 percent of LBTI women were victims of violence: far more than we expected. This includes violence from parents and from their partner, but even within partnerships and intimate relationships, 42 percent of LBTI women were victims of domestic violence,” Li said.

On top of that, almost 80 percent of these women are unable to get support from service providers, such as policemen, judges, and even social workers. A lot of the time, “they have no idea how to deal with a gay couple who are in a situation involving domestic violence.”

This issue is not LBTI specific, as service providers in China often have the same issues when dealing with straight people who are subject to domestic violence.

“When they tell the police ‘my husband hit me’ the police will say ‘ok, you should not do that to your wife, go home and work it out.’ And that is the best case scenario. In the worst case the police will say ‘you made a mistake, that’s why you were hit.’  There is a lot of victim blaming going on with direct service providers, that is why we work on strengthening capabilities of service providers.”

That is why, when China passes their nationwide domestic violence law, hopefully within a year, Common Language are working on capacity building with service providers, and hoping to make the law LBTI inclusive. 

Ensuring the law is inclusive
“A big part of that is that there has been a lot of back and forth about including cohabitation because most likely protection for LBTI people will fall under that because of the lack of civil union in China. Including cohabitation doesn’t actually only concern LBTI people, it actually concerns everyone, because more young people are not getting married.”

On top of that, the law needs to include violence from biological family members, as research showed that most LBTI community members experience domestic violence from biological family members.

“A lot of times what happens is if a young person comes out, his or her parents will involuntarily commit him or her to a psychiatric institution or ground them in the house. In most of these cases, involuntary commitment takes place, physical violence is perpetrated by the parent, and also, the person’s economic and mobility was restricted by the parent. In some cases, it was the person’s partner who reached out to us through social media for help, to see if we could make a referral to legal or social services.”

Multiple judicial interpretations
Wangshu and Li remain hopeful, as the law is almost certainly going to pass, but their recommended changes remain in limbo. To pass laws in China, multiple meetings have to take place to review and discuss potential changes. In any case, passing the law is only the first stage for Common Language.

“We will monitor the implementation of the law. Chinese laws have an official judicial interpretation which will increase the scope of the law because sometimes judicial interpretations will have additional information about how to implement the law, for the judges to rule or for the judicial department to take into consideration whenever a case is brought before them,” Li said.

“In 2012 when they amended the marriage law for the first time it came with a lot of unfavorable judicial interpretations. The same thing could happen here, so we hope that the judicial interpretations will come with a broader scope, even if the law itself does not pass with all of our recommendations. There are also a lot of things that are questionable, for example marital rape, of course all the feminist organizations want it included, but we don’t know whether it will be,” she said.

Another reason to be hopeful is the scope of domestic violence, also a mainstream issue, leaving the topic much more likely to be viewed as a problem. “This issue concerns everyone, it is even problematic for those with heterosexual privilege. If the people who have the resources in society are also experiencing the same problems it is likely to get resolved more efficiently, but as far as LBTI communities in China, it is our job to educate members of the community and also just to make people conscious that first of all, you should not perpetrate domestic violence, second of all, if it happens to you, these are the services that we can provide for you,” Li said.

For more information, visit www.tongyulala.org.

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Photos: Ken