The Relationship Between Gender Inequality and Female-Victim Intimate Partner Homicide in China: Amelioration, Backlash or Both?

Abstract

A debate existing in feminist and criminological literature is the plausible macro-level relationship between gender inequality and female-victim intimate partner homicide (FV-IPH). The amelioration hypothesis assumes the reduction of gender-based violence in more gender-egalitarian societies, while the backlash hypothesis anticipates that reducing gender inequality may actually increase males’ violence perpetration against women to maintain their dominance. A third theoretical account hypothesizes a curvilinear relationship that integrates the traditional theses and provides a possible explanation for some inconsistent findings. This study revisited and tested these three macro-level theoretical propositions using detailed incident information on 11,310 Chinese judgment documents of intentional homicides (2017-2019) and multidimensional gender inequality indices across provinces. By disentangling the incident-level effects from the aggregate-level forces, our models enable a more explicit estimation of the relationship between provincial gender inequality and FV-IPH. The results indicated that: 1) backlash processes are more likely to occur with increases in women’s empowerment; 2) the relationship between the degree of egalitarian gender ideology and men’s likelihood of committing FV-IPH conforms to an inverted U. Using an innovative Chinese big-data source and text-mining approach, this study represents a pioneering endeavor, as it furnishes robust empirical evidence to corroborate the curvilinear relationship between cultural gender inequality and FV-IPH in a non-Western context. The implications of our findings underscore the need for tailored policy interventions that take into account the nuanced dimensions of gender inequality, particularly those that are culture-related.