Chinese police officers’ attitudes toward domestic violence interventions: do training and knowledge of the Anti-Domestic Violence Law matter?

ABSTRACT

In March 2016, China’s Anti-Domestic Violence Law became effective. The main objective of this study is to empirically test the effects of training and knowledge on the recent anti-domestic violence legislation on Chinese police officers’ attitudes toward law enforcement interventions into domestic violence. Performing Path Analysis on survey data collected from 623 police officers in Jiangsu, China, this study found that training and knowledge on the law, while mediating the positive effects of organisational support and previous experience of handling domestic violence on officers’ proactive attitudes toward policing domestic violence, did not have a direct connection to pro-arrest attitudes. Organisational support is the strongest predictor of endorsement of domestic violence interventions as important police work and pro-arrest attitudes. Implications for criminal justice policies and practice are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• domestic violence
• China
• Anti-Domestic Violence Law

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This language is commonly used by the Chinese government to describe domestic violence.

2 It should be noted that along with the Chinese studies, research on arrest decision making in domestic violence conducted in the UK (e.g. Hoyle 1998; Myhill 2019) and the US (e.g., Durfee and Fetzer 2016; Eitle 2005; Robinson and Chandek 2000) have also identified situational factors such as officers’ understanding of domestic violence (in particular coercive control) and evidence of visible injury and sexual assault as significant predictors of a proactive response. While these situational factors may be decisive in shaping actual decision making of arrest, they were unavailable in our data and thus were not included in the analysis.

3 Unusable surveys are surveys that had missing information on multiple essential modules, whereas missing cases are cases that happened to have missing information on one or more items that were used to construct the variables in this study.

4 Results of indirect effects were not included in the figures, but they were estimated and tested for statistical significance, and are discussed in this section.

5 Although it could be that those who are more knowledgeable of the Law seek out these training to attend, given that most training in police departments in China are mostly mandatory, there are good reasons to believe that training casts an influence on knowledge.

6 Upon analyzing over 140,000 adjudication decisions in two populous provinces in China, Michelson (2019) found that a plaintiff’s claim of domestic violence did not increase the probability a court granting divorce, contrary to the stipulation of China’s Marriage Law. In reality, first-time divorce petitions are almost always denied unless both spouses willingly agree to divorce. This highly institutionalized practice of decoupling in China constitutes a vivid example of the disconnect between the seemingly progressive, pro-rights legal norms that the Chinese legislative and judicial institutions ostensibly uphold, and the cold reality of a sizable population of female marital-violence victims that the actual legislative, judicial, and law enforcement practice fails to protect (Michelson 2019).