In the Wednesday Seminar on 30 March, Ms. Yuxuan Gu, an MPhil student from Gender Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, shared her research on “Analyzing Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide in China via Hierarchical Models and Data Mining Methods”.

Although the overall trend of the homicide rate in the world seems a declining one, intimate partner homicide (IPH), especially female-victim intimate partner homicide (FV-IPH), shows its stability. In China, among the couples who filed for divorce cases because of domestic violence, up to 91.41% of the perpetrator were male. Built upon this contextual background, Ms. Gu’s study proposes a theoretical account integrating the traditional ameliorative and backlash theses, offers a possible explanation for some of the inconsistent findings, and provides empirical examination in mainland China.

Ms. GU selected 11,310 intentional homicide cases from the China Judgments Online website and used hierarchical models and data mining methods to conduct the analysis. The findings illustrate that: 1) in terms of the instrumental dimensions of gender equality, the backlash processes are likely to dominate at lower to higher levels of women empowerment; 2) the relationship between the cultural dimension of gender equality and levels of FV-IPH conforms to an inverted U, such that a backlash effect operates in the short-term but is followed by an ameliorative effect in the longer term. By leveraging detailed information on 11310 homicide cases, this study pioneers the analysis of FV-IPH in mainland China. It presents researchers with an effective method of utilizing text-mining techniques and hierarchical models which explore the integration of structural gender equality and incidental level characteristics.

Written by: SUN Yining, SHI Xinyu