Intimate Violence and Sexual Violence in Chinese Societies with Jia Xue

WAPPP Fellow Jia Xue, PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, presented her work on domestic violence, social media, and mental health in the Chinese context.  

To begin, she described two cases of domestic violence in China: in the first, a Chinese woman, married at 26, was severely beaten by her husband. She called the police at least eight times, but they refused to intervene on the grounds that domestic violence was a “family matter.” The woman ultimately died in 2008 after ten months of marriage because of the abuse. In the other, an American woman married a Chinese man who was a famous English teacher. When her husband began abusing her, she also reported to the police who said that they could not assist her. She decided to post pictures of her injuries on Weibo, often described as China’s Twitter. Within an hour, her post had been retweeted 10,000 times and had received 4,000 comments. With the help of activists on social media, she launched a landmark case against her husband and received compensation for the abuse.

While these two cases differ on many grounds, the use of social media to speak out against abuse caught Jia’s eye. Weibo was established in 2010 and grew quickly, so that by the time the American woman chose to speak out in 2011, there was an established social media community to bring public scrutiny to her case. Social media, according to Jia, has changed the public from consumers of information to producers of information, telling the government and the media what they think should be on the policy agenda.

The growth of social media in China has been astronomical. More than half of all internet users are Chinese, and almost 90% of the Chinese population owns a mobile phone. Weibo is the leading Chinese social network and boasts more than 600 million users.

While many terms are used to describe domestic violence in the United States – including intimate partner violence, violence against women, and gender-based violence – domestic violence is the sole term used in China, and refers specifically to physical harm perpetrated by current family members. Domestic violence in the Chinese context does not include violence by former partners or among same-sex couples. While there is no national representative survey of domestic violence in China, the All-China Women’s Federation estimates that one-third of married women have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime.

Jia pointed out a twenty-year lag between the U.S. and China in terms of domestic violence legislation. The U.S. first passed the Violence Against Women Act in 1994. The Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 raised awareness about the issue of domestic violence, but the first provincial regulation against it was not released until 2000, in Hunan. In 2001, domestic violence was mentioned for the first time in a national-level law. Finally, after many years of advocacy, a national domestic violence law was passed in 2015, to be implemented in March 2016.

Jia’s research is at the intersection of violence and social media, using computational, big-data approaches to examine domestic violence. One of her current projects is to explore (re)tweeting behavior of domestic violence topics on Twitter. Using topic modeling to summarize and categorize tweets, it became clear that organizational Twitter accounts discuss domestic violence in the context of advocacy, while individual Twitter accounts are more likely to discuss high-profile individual cases, like those about sports or movie stars. 

In a separate study, she examined the correlation between use of traditional or contemporary media and prevalence rates of domestic violence. Survey respondents who were more likely to read books experienced fewer incidents of violence, while those who had higher levels of internet use reported more domestic violence. Jia hypothesized that more time spent online reduces communication between couples, which leads to marital tension, though the reverse could be true: in relationships with a higher incidence of violence, individuals may spend more time on the internet to be away from their spouse. The seminar audience also pointed out that there could be a generational effect: older survey respondents may be less likely to use the internet and less likely to categorize certain behaviors as domestic violence. Alternatively, there could be salience bias in this sample: survey respondents who spend more time online and consume more international news may have learned more about the issue of domestic violence and have a different view of the issue than those who consume more traditional media sources.

Jia described one final study on using social media to explore the impact of domestic violence on mental health in China. One limitation of existing studies is that domestic violence is unpredictable; it is difficult to measure mental health before and after an incident of domestic violence. With Weibo, researchers have a corpus of posts from individuals over a long period of time and can isolate messages before and after a given incident to examine the impacts of domestic violence on depression, suicidal ideation, and life satisfaction.  Jia and her colleagues amassed data from 1.6 million users, a total of 5 billion posts. The researchers selected posts based on nine types of domestic violence keywords and then manually screened posts to ensure that the poster was describing a personal incident. Ultimately, 644 posts were identified as real domestic violence cases. The next step was for the researchers to identify whether the post described the poster’s first experience of domestic violence, including if the post clearly stated that this was the first experience (approximately 70% of posts) or that the poster had never experienced domestic violence before (15%). Ultimately, the researchers ended up with 232 unique Weibo posts. Finally, the researchers selected a group of 232 Weibo users with no domestic violence experience and matched them to the existing pool based on gender and location.

For the four weeks prior to and after the first-time incident of domestic violence, the researchers used natural language processing and behavioral features to create a prediction model of users’ levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and life satisfaction.  The two matched groups did not show any significant differences in mental health before the domestic violence incidents, and the non-victim group did not show any significant changes in mental health over the eight-week period.  For Weibo users who experience intimate partner violence, 40% were more depressed after the incident, but there were no significant impacts on suicidal ideation or life satisfaction. Posters who experienced abuse from their parents demonstrated lower life satisfaction after the first-time event. Those who were exposed to domestic violence but were not themselves the victim had a higher rate of suicidal ideation and lower life satisfaction.

There are certain limitations of this study: researchers have to rely on profile information, and there may be a selection bias for posters who are willing to describe their experience on social media. However, this study was able to show short-term mental health impacts after incidents of domestic violence using innovative methods. These research findings may spur additional research or policy interventions for prevention.