Gender-based violence sparks debate on women safety on Chinese social media

Debates on Chinese social media regarding the safety of women in China were sparked after a girl was brutally attacked by a group of men in Tangshan in Hebei province.

On June 10, the video showing the girl being harassed went viral on Chinese social media applications like Weibo and WeChat. Social media nearly dominated the conversations around the viral video. It also became trending on Baidu, an internet search engine company in China.

According to the reports, the video shows a man harassing a girl and then violently attacking her with his group of friends after she turned down unwanted attention. The incident has sparked debates on social media regarding the safety of women in China.

Some of the social media users were quick enough to dig out a post by the Communist youth league official on Weibo which said "freedom to roam at night? This is something that you do not get in the US because of crime rates there."

Many described these incidents as an "epidemic of gender-based violence". There was also outrage among netizens on the reporting of an incident which termed it as a "clash" rather than an "attack".

The girl is said to be critically injured.

Notably, gender equality is still a challenge in China as there is a large gap in the treatment of women in the country, said a media report. In its report, European Times said that over 70 years down the line, Chinese women lag as compared to men in almost all arenas. Gender equality remains a distant goal and conditions are, in fact, getting worse.

The country once enjoyed one of the highest rates of women's labour force participation in the world. Nearly 3 in 4 women worked as recently as 1990 but now that figure is just 61 per cent, as per the International Labour Organization.There is a noticeable lack of women in managerial or leadership positions, European Times reported.

As per the World Economic Forum (WEF), only 17 per cent of senior managers, officials and legislators in China are women. Then the official retirement age for women in China is at least 5 years earlier than men, creating more financial uncertainty for them, said the report.

The report further said that nowhere is the gender gap more apparent than in Chinese politics. In 70 years, neither a single woman has been appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest governing body, nor has any woman held the presidency. Also, none of the 31 provincial-level governments is led by a woman. In more than 70 years, only six women were members in the wider 25-member Politburo.

Notably, the WEF ranks China 78th in terms of the political involvement of women.

The report highlighted the country's one-child policy and said that China's controversial One-Child Policy and a cultural bias toward a male child have been cited as the main reasons behind this discrepancy.

The policy, introduced in the late 1970s, was meant to slow down China's rapid population growth. The now-defunct policy has attracted wide criticism for encouraging gender-selective and forced abortions in this largely patriarchal society. Now the country has an estimated 31 million "surplus" men, European Times reported.