As many news outlets have reported, there has been a first in China — an
American named Kim Lee made legal history when she was granted a divorce on
grounds of domestic violence.

Lee, an American teacher, met her husband, a millionaire Chinese entrepreneur
and founder of English learning program known as Crazy English, while she
was on a research trip to China to study foreign-language teaching practices in
1999. They fell in love, married soon after, and had three children. The couple
was a household name in China and often the center of frenzied crowds and
paparazzi. But in 2011 that image changed into what the Chinese press called “a
folk hero for China’s battered wives,” when Lee uploaded photos of her injuries to
the Web and went public with her abuse. The images showed her face bruised
and puffy, with a bloody ear and a raised bump on her forehead. She was a
victim of domestic abuse, her message explained. In going public about a secret
most families in China have long preferred to keep hidden, Lee bravely started a
conversation and may have set an important precedent.

As reported in The New York Times, the judgment was a victory not only for Lee
and her three daughters, but also for advocates of the rule of law on behalf of
China’s often-silenced victims of domestic violence. “All of society was paying
attention,” Guo Jianmei, a prominent lawyer told the New York Times reporter,
Didi Kirsten Tatlow, after the ruling. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

Widely overlooked, the extent of domestic violence in China is difficult to
measure. Bloomberg News reported that although most officially cited studies
are thought to underestimate its prevalence, in 2011, the All China Women’s
Federation, a state-steered non-governmental organization, released its findings
that 25 percent of women in China have been victims of some form of domestic
violence. A survey by the China Law Society put that number at 35 percent. An
academic study published in 1999 in the International Journal of Gynecology
and Obstetrics found that 16 percent of pregnant woman admitted to the clinic of
Hong Kong’s Tsan Yuk Hospital had suffered domestic abuse in the preceding
year.

Lee took her husband to court and ignited a national conversation about
domestic abuse. The Atlantic reported that on the street she encountered men
who cursed her. In perhaps the clearest sign of what she was confronting, her
husband’s lawyer, Shi Ziyue, disputed that the abuse constituted “domestic
violence” because, he said, “Domestic violence is when a man hits and injures
his wife frequently over a long time but has no reason, but my client did that
because he had conflicts with his wife.”

And yet, Lee found that China’s new social-media networks equipped women
across the country to reach out to her. By last Friday, just before the ruling, Lee
had received more than 1,400 messages of support from strangers. Lee stated
to the New York Times, “It quickly became a matter of the other women and their
stories. No one else was speaking out. I just felt I had to.”

After the verdict, Lee posted a message to the Web: “Believe that there’s light at
the end of the tunnel.”

Sources:

The Atlantic, February 7, 2013

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/
2013/02/can-an-american-woman-stop-domestic-violence-in-china/272954/

The New Yorker, February 5, 2013

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2013/02/a-landmark-
domestic-violence-case-in-china.html

New Your Times, February 4, 2013

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/in-chinas-most-watched-
divorce-case-3-victories-1-defeat/