Now Li lives in a dirty, dimly lit hospital room in the industrial city of Shenyang, Liaoning province, not far from her hometown. Her face is covered with scars and blisters. Her hands are claws. Not so long ago, she would have faced permanent suffering and a life on the streets. Her father may have been punished, or could just as easily have slipped back into a normal life. Instead, in a rare sign of progress, lawyers from the Communist Party-controlled women’s federation helped send Li’s father to prison. And they’re trying to raise money so the girl can get plastic surgery.
After centuries of ignoring abuse against women, China is finally confronting a massive domestic-violence problem. According to government surveys, one in three husbands hits his wife or children. Chinese women suffer the highest suicide rates of any women in the world–a fact some believe is directly related to spousal abuse.
China long considered domestic violence a matter for families to resolve themselves, but that began to change in 1995, when Beijing hosted the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women. Since then there has been evidence of real action: the government last year gave women the right to sue for divorce on the ground of abuse, and state television broadcast a popular show designed to raise awareness of domestic violence. Last summer a women’s group set up a special hot line in Beijing and plastered posters across the city urging victims to call in. Hundreds did. “At least now women realize that being abused is unfair,” says Guo Jianmei, head of the Beijing University Center for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services. “Before 1998 or so, women didn’t come here to talk about domestic violence. Maybe they would talk about divorce. They might even have scars. But they wouldn’t mention abuse.” The government now cites domestic violence as the cause for up to two thirds of the country’s divorces.
Even so, most women in abusive relationships don’t leave their husbands. Divorce still carries a stigma in Chinese society, and it can be difficult to obtain one. When incidents of physical abuse occur, Chinese police officers and prosecutors favor mediation rather than arrest. Often police will ask a man to sign a written agreement that he will never beat his wife again. And splitting up the family is the very last resort. “If it’s not that serious we will educate the couple, because it takes two people to fight. It’s not just the man,” says one police officer in the city of Anshan, a steel town that Chinese experts say is doing more than most to protect women.
Women are also learning to fight back–in the courts. A doll-faced salesclerk in Beijing says that after getting married in her early 20s, she and her husband often fought over finances, in-laws and when they should have a child. Then, about two years into the marriage, her husband beat her up for the first time. Last summer, when he beat her again, damaging her eardrum, she went to the police. They documented her –injuries. Then she called a lawyer. Because her husband confessed to beating her, the court quickly granted a divorce–in part because of the new law. Her husband was never prosecuted, but she was satisfied. “No woman wants to drag out the process,” she said, adding that one of her friends had to bribe a judge to get her a divorce–and give her abusive husband the house, too.
Chinese courts are also increasingly showing leniency toward women who kill their husbands out of desperation. Instead of ordering the wives to be executed, which has been the standard punishment, judges are now handing down life sentences or even less. In Shenyang, where Li lives, attorney Fu Guangrong has started a home named Sunlight Village for children whose mothers have been imprisoned for killing their spouses. In a recent case, lawyers at the Beijing University Center borrowed a controversial concept from the West and argued that a woman was suffering from battered-woman’s syndrome when she killed her spouse. A judge agreed to set aside her death sentence for two years and consider overturning it if she behaves in prison. “This is a big change,” said the woman’s lawyer, Liu Wei. “At first the judge didn’t know about the theory, but we explained it to him.” China may be learning slowly, but its women can be thankful the knowledge is at last beginning to spread.
title: “Trouble At Home” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-13” author: “Gertrude Condra”
In Vietnam and Korea, the average soldier spent less than a year overseas, and most of the troops were young conscripts. The grunts who fought in the 1991 gulf war rejoined their families after a few months in the desert. In Iraq, much of the burden has fallen on older reservists and National Guardsmen, many of whom have gone back for second and third tours. The toll on family life is still being calculated. Divorces in the military doubled in 2004, according to the Pentagon, and though they dropped the following year, many experts believe the real impact can be assessed only over a longer period. “The question is not whether it affects the marriage,” says Dorothy Ogilvy-Lee, who served as chief of family programs for the National Guard until 2004. “It’s more a matter of how bad the impact [on marriage] gets.”
For the Velottas, who have spent just two weeks together in the past 14 months, the struggle ebbs and flows. NEWSWEEK is publishing a months-long account of the war in Iraq and the hardships back home for the families of the 4-23 both in the magazine and on NEWSWEEK.com. Though the Velottas’ marriage is clearly strong, what emerges from conversations with both and e-mail exchanges they shared with NEWSWEEK is a painful picture of longing and bitterness; little misunderstandings and larger anxieties about the distance and about their future together. “I’m seeing another side of you and I’m not quite sure what to make of it,” Brad writes Jodi after one heated exchange. “When we get to talk, I feel like we are still carrying frustrations from the last call and the call before that,” says Jodi from her home in Plaucheville, La.
Raising two kids alone–3-1/2-year-old Sophia and 2-year-old Hudson–is hard enough on Jodi, who also volunteers at Sophia’s school. What drives her nuts, she says, is when Brad tries to control the parenting from afar. Recently she told him about Sophia’s shenanigans in preschool. For the first week, Sophia refused to nap, crying and disturbing the other children. The preschool teacher let her sit at a desk and color, until one day she put her head on the table and fell asleep. Now she’s allowed to take a blanket to the desk and sleep there regularly, Jodi told Brad. “His first reaction is, ‘Yeah, that’s my girl,’ but then he starts saying that she needs to listen to her teachers and she needs to lie down with the other children. I thought it was funny and now he is turning it around on me. I give up. He can’t come over and talk to the teachers.”
Brad does his best to stay engaged, but he is often exhausted by the time he gets to the phone or the computer on base after dodging gunfire all day. Reading news from home about his children’s longings drains him. “Hudson saw a plane today while he was riding his big wheel on the sidewalk and he was telling you hello,” Jodi wrote Brad recently. “The plane went behind the clouds and he got upset that he couldn’t see it anymore. He asked where is DaDa with tears in his eyes, then threw himself on the ground.”
Brad–who keeps pictures of his family in the military notebook he carries with him on missions, hunting bad guys and scouring Baghdad for IEDs–agonizes over the milestones he’s missed. “My son speaks and runs whereas he didn’t walk/talk when I left. I try to keep him engaged with sounds and various questions about trucks, his favorite topic. He lasts 20 seconds and then he’s off to play,” Brad wrote NEWSWEEK in an e-mail. “My daughter speaks to me in organized, coherent, and logical conversations about her daily tasks … All I wanted to do is hear her little voice. She is so assertive. This is where and when I feel stress.”
In another e-mail, Jodi reproached Brad for not being there when she needed him. Brad wrote back: “I’m upset that you … and I can’t seem to get along. I don’t want to re-deploy and go home to this type of a relationship. I’m sure you don’t want to either … Life is too short.” He added: “I have changed since I left. I know what I want. I don’t want strife and preconceived ill feelings about how I feel towards the No. 1 person in my life.”
There are other exchanges as well: tender messages and loving phone calls. Ogilvy-Lee, the former family-programs chief, says in some cases the distance makes couples realize what they have and actually brings them closer. The Army in recent years has spent millions on programs aimed at doing just that. But the programs, even when they work, are only stopgap measures. “This needs to come to an end because it’s tearing families apart,” says Jodi Velotta. At a military base in Baghdad, where soldiers hope to be home by Christmas, Brad would surely agree.
