Decoupling: Marital Violence and the Struggle to Divorce in China

An analysis of adjudicated divorce decisions in two Chinese provinces reveals the extent to which and the reasons why Chinese courts subvert the global legal norms they symbolically embrace. In China, uncontested no-fault divorces are readily attainable outside the court system. Courts, by contrast, granted divorces in fewer than half of the cases they adjudicated. Despite an abundance of formal legal mechanisms designed to provide relief to victims of marital abuse, a plaintiff’s claim of domestic violence did not increase the probability a court granted a divorce request. Chinese courts’ highly institutionalized practice of denying first-attempt divorce petitions and granting divorces on subsequent litigation attempts disproportionately impacts women and has spawned a sizable population of female marital-violence refugees. These findings carry substantive and theoretical implications concerning the limits and possibilities of the local penetration of global legal norms.