When domestic violence becomes ‘family conflict’

Abstract

This study examines how domestic violence (DV) is discursively constructed in Chinese divorce judgments. Drawing on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA), it analyses a corpus of divorces judgments involving domestic violence to show how legal reasoning recontextualizes violence through linguistic practices of naming, explanation, and evidentiary evaluation. The analysis identifies three recurring discursive shifts. First, acts of violence are frequently reframed as “family conflict,” embedding them within a relational frame that obscures the asymmetry of power between perpetrators and victims. Second, perpetrator responsibility is mitigated through psychologizing and contextual explanations, such as emotional stress, economic pressure, and intoxication. Third, elevated evidentiary thresholds and moralized assessments reshape credibility, placing heightened burdens on survivors’ testimony. These practices relocate domestic violence from the domain of public harm to that of private family conflict management. The findings show how routine judicial language can reproduce gendered power relations through apparently neutral forms of legal reasoning.