Civil society’s contribution to the development of the China’s first national law on domestic violence

Dziaugyte, Lina

4. term

Development and International Relations, Master

2015

2015-05-18

53 pages

In 1995, China hosted the UN Conference on Women’s Rights, which was internationally and domestically a significant event. While internationally it formulated anti-VAW (violence against women) campaigns, it introduced the term of domestic violence for the first time to the hosting country’s society. Moreover, the Conference helped to legitimise civil sphere organisations, and provided them with the framework to operate. In the end of the last year the very first China’s national law on domestic violence has been drafted. This thesis gives a detailed analysis of the overall process of creation of this law by applying two theories – David Easton’s System Theory to Political Science and Peter Ho’s embedded social activism. It discusses the role of the civil organisations in this process while also considering the challenges these organisations had to face. In the following years after the Conference, Chinese government increased women’s rights development; however, domestic violence was still politically and socially regarded as a taboo topic. The increased number of women’s rights NGOs started launching projects to educate the society over the issue, one of them being “Don’t talk to strangers”, the very first China’s national TV show about domestic violence. This TV show helped to make the topic of domestic violence to lose its political sensitivity, however, it was still considered as family matter, which meant that common people regarded the topic to be shameful to discuss. Afterwards, two stories of Kim Li and Li Yan went public, which not only increased society’s awareness of the problem but also pointed out that the country lacks juridical protection for the people suffering from domestic abuses. In the last few years, civil sphere put a great effort to tackle this problem, which peaked with government’s willingness to deal with the problem and the very first law on domestic violence was created.

Domestic violence ; Chinese NGOs ; women’s rights ; civil society ; national law ; INGOs in China ; embedded social activism

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