On July 7, a 42-year-old woman and her younger sister, both surnamed Chang (張), were murdered in broad daylight in New Taipei City’s Tucheng District (土城). The suspect — the older woman’s husband, surnamed Hsieh (謝) — was reportedly angry that Chang had applied for a restraining order against him.
The two had appeared in family court that morning, as Hsieh had recently breached the order’s conditions. After Chang and her sister left the courthouse, Hsieh followed them back to her residence, after which he reportedly rammed his car into their scooter and allegedly stabbed the pair to death.
On Wednesday last week — less than one month later — a 27-year-old woman surnamed Ku (谷) was murdered in a parking lot in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義). Ku’s ex-boyfriend, surnamed Liu (劉), had allegedly waited for her to arrive home. He has been accused of dragging her into the stairwell and stabbing her before fleeing the scene.
Ku had applied for a restraining order against Liu in May, citing acts of domestic violence he had committed, including choking her, and stalking her home and workplace. The day before her death, Ku wrote on social media that the order had just been approved.
These cases share striking similarities, but perhaps the most unfortunate is that both women had done everything in their legal power to protect themselves. That they were apparently murdered by the men they had sought legal protection against highlights critical failures in the nation’s protective mechanisms for victims of domestic violence.
Although the prompt issuance of protection orders is crucial in decreasing the likelihood of repeated abuse, data from the Judicial Yuan indicate that courts took an average of 42.63 days to issue an official document last year. This lack of institutional urgency was apparent in Ku’s case, as her restraining order against Liu took about two months to be issued.
However, made clear by both cases is that protective orders do not guarantee victims’ safety. Amendments to the Domestic Violence Prevention Act (家庭暴力防治法) in 2023 — allowing for preventive detention or court-ordered arrest if a perpetrator contravenes the conditions of a protective order — aimed to address this, but such measures are only effective when properly implemented. Prosecutors detained Hsieh for just one day after he broke the conditions of Chang’s order, and allegedly murdered her the day after his release.
These tragedies are symptoms of a grim reality — despite the legal mechanisms in place, women in Taiwan remain disproportionately subject to abuse by their intimate partners.
Reported incidents of domestic violence in Taiwan total more than 120,000 annually — a number that rises each year. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Taiwan Health and Welfare Report last year, most cases in 2023 were categorized as intimate partner violence (IPV), with more than 75 percent of victims being women. The ministry’s 2021 survey on IPV found that nearly 20 percent of all women aged 18 to 74 had been abused by an intimate partner.
Despite these figures, current laws are reactive rather than preventive and fail to reflect a nuanced understanding of gendered violence. The review of Taiwan’s fourth country report for the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in December 2022 raised concerns that, although women in Taiwan are disproportionately impacted by IPV, current measures are ineffective because they “do not address effectively the root causes of the problem and such violence is not viewed as a result of gender inequality.”
From the initial passage of the Domestic Violence Prevention Act in 1998 to the adoption of CEDAW in 2011, Taiwan has demonstrated a desire to address widespread violence against women. However, achieving a truly preventive model would demand legal reframing, improved implementation and a cultural reckoning with the gendered nature of domestic violence.
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