Domestic Violence Governance in China: Frontline Discretion, Legal Discourse, and the Implementation Gap

Abstract

This article analyses how institutional failure materialises at the frontline of China’s anti–domestic violence regime. Framed by three questions—how practitioners understand the state, why these understandings take shape, and how they guide implementation—it integrates MacKinnon’s dominance approach with Smart’s critique of legal discourse into an “institution–discourse–practice” lens. Based on semi-structured interviews with nine cross-sector practitioners (police, community/subdistrict officials, Women’s Federation/social workers, lawyers), the study employs reflexive thematic analysis and juxtaposes interview accounts with legal/policy texts. A testable process model is advanced—“Declaration–Implementation–Reclassification–Reinfusion.” Textual proclamations of equality/neutrality are naturalised as a priori facts; operationalisation proceeds via proceduralisation and segmented authority; in zones of indeterminacy, street-level discretion reclassifies cases; failure is then reinfused through justificatory narratives (“resource scarcity,” “individual choice,” “family harmony”) that inoculate against structural scrutiny. Three mechanisms emerge: (1) responsibility externalisation, shifting public protection onto survivors as self-risk management; (2) mechanised implementation, where record-keeping and interdepartmental referral substitute for outcomes of violence cessation and sustained safety; (3) discretionary reclassification, which raises severity thresholds, downgrades labels, and familises violence, even substituting accountability with “order restoration” through public shaming. Conceptually, the article theorises a “state-constituted field of discretion.” Policy recommendations centre evaluation on violence cessation and sustained safety, hard-wire triggers/lead-backstop/escalation timelines, expand evidentiary proxies for coercive control and patterned abuse, reorient metrics toward demonstrable risk reduction, empower social work beyond projectification, ensure accountable inter-agency coordination, and prohibit public-shaming “mediation.