Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Holly Cheng/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A RECENT MURDER case involving a woman and her sister being stabbed to death by her husband while on a scooter in New Taipei last month proves familiar. Namely, there are a number of cases in past years of women being murdered by men. The causes return to weak enforcement of anti-stalking laws in Taiwan.
The woman who was stabbed to death, surnamed Chang, had a restraining order against her husband, surnamed Hsieh. In particular, Hsieh had been abusive to Chang for years, and Chang was filing for divorce at the time of her murder.
The murder occurred after a court hearing, with Hsieh slamming a car into the scooter that Chang and her sister were riding. Subsequently, Hsieh stabbed the two women to death.
According to Chang’s father, this was not the first time that Hsieh had threatened their family, with Hsieh having previously come to their home and been violent. Though police were called, they only held Hsieh for eight hours and claimed to be unable to do anything further. Chang was required to stay 100 meters away from Hsieh, but violated the restraining order several times and was not required to wear an ankle monitor. Indeed, legal experts have stated that restraining orders are ineffective in 20% of cases, leading them to advise potential victims to stay with relatives or move elsewhere if they are targeted by abusers.
This is hardly the only case in past years. In April 2021, a 55-year-old man surnamed Huang was suspected of killing a 29-year-old woman surnamed Zeng. Huang first met Zeng because she worked in a cell phone store. After incidents of harassing and inappropriately touching Zeng in February, he began stalking her in March.
Zeng subsequently reported him to the police for sexual harassment and stalking. However, police were legally unable to take action because legislation only applied to individuals formerly in a relationship, such as former spouses or unmarried partners, or blood relatives, such as family members, which was not the case with Zeng. The law was unable to take action against Huang because they were not individuals formerly in a relationship, but because this was a one-sided romantic and/or sexual interest by Huang in Zeng.
Huang turned himself in to police during the early morning hours of April 9th, 2021, but initially did not reveal Zeng’s whereabouts. After questioning, police discovered Zeng’s dead body in a house. An examination of her body suggests that Zeng died from injuries suffered during a crash that Zeng carried out to kidnap her; Zeng was knocked unconscious after her head hit a guardrail rail and her injuries worsened because she was not treated. This eventually resulted in her death.
A similar case occurred in 2020, in which a Malaysian student studying at Chang Jung Christian University was strangled to death by a Taiwanese man. This, too, appears to have been a case of kidnapping and attempted sexual assault gone awry, after the student in question was accidentally strangled to death by the man while he was attempting to subdue her. Before the murder, there had already been reports of a man who tried to abduct and sexually assault women near the campus of the school, but the university administration and police did little.
There are 20,000 reported cases of stalking per year in Taiwan—yet the response from the Judicial Yuan has in the past been that it does not have enough resources to address this and should address fewer cases, rather than increase capacity. Such tragedies attest to that law enforcement often does not act even if informed of potential cases of violence.
To this extent, even if there are a number of violent crimes in Taiwan that involve men attacking women, there is rarely any systematic discussion of this issue and the weakness of existing laws. Indeed, even if there is consciousness of that there is a need for new legal frameworks to deal with digital sexual assault and other rising challenges, the issue of domestic violence and stalking in Taiwan or any other country is not new. As such, there is a need for further discussion of such issues, even if society has not realized it yet.