Opinion | China’s legal system must change to protect sexual harassment survivors
- The sad truth is that the system tends to favour the defendant in civil litigation. Courts should place more weight on testimony and reconsider the ‘high degree of likelihood’ standard, which is challenging compared to other parts of the world
As a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a maths teacher at my primary school, I am bitterly disappointed by the court ruling, yet I am not too surprised. The sad truth is that China’s legal system tends to favour the defendant in such cases.
“When survivors sue harassers, they, like most plaintiffs in civil litigation in China, must prove their claims to the court to a ‘high degree of likelihood’, but meeting this high bar is extremely challenging,” Darius Longarino, a senior fellow of the Paul Tsai China Centre at Yale Law School, told me.
Since sexual misconduct usually takes place in private space and between two people, there are not always witnesses or hard evidence such as recordings or text messages. Without them, however, survivors almost always lose because the Chinese judges give little credence to litigant testimony.
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Even if there is hard evidence, it is not certain that judges will see it. Zhou said that the court rejected her lawyer’s efforts to present evidence, including video footage from outside the dressing room. “Ultimately, the court didn’t give us any space for making a statement,” she said in a statement after the verdict.