cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49938886

A decision not to charge a man who fathered children with a woman with a mental illness has set off a debate about rape, consent and China’s push for babies.

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Years ago, a disheveled woman with signs of mental illness appeared in a village in northern China. One man decided to bring her home and, over the next 13 years, he had several children with her. He was later detained on suspicion of rape.

Recently, prosecutors reached a conclusion that stunned many Chinese. They determined that the woman’s mental illness left her unable to defend herself from sexual assault, but said the man had not committed any crime.

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The decision in Heshun County, a rural area of Shanxi Province, provoked widespread outrage. On social media, critics said it suggested that when a sexual relationship produces children, the authorities are willing to overlook a woman’s possible lack of consent.

Further stoking anger was the fact that prosecutors did charge two other male villagers with raping her, specifically citing a doctor’s assessment that the woman, identified by her surname, Bu, had “no sexual self-defense capacity.”

The term comes from Chinese official guidelines about how to evaluate women with mental disorders who are potential victims of rape; it means that the woman has “lost the ability to recognize and protect her own right to sexual inviolability.” Chinese criminal law does not explicitly define sexual consent, but says that rape involves “violence, coercion or other means.”

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For many women, the [Chinese] prosecutors’ decision confirmed their fears about how far the government will go to promote childbearing. As China’s birthrate plunges, the government told women to see starting a family as a patriotic duty. Marital rape is not defined as a crime in China. (Prosecutors said the man, identified by the surname Zhang, held a wedding celebration for himself and Ms. Bu but did not say if they were ever legally married.)

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Ms. Bu’s story first came to light in 2024, when a woman in Heshun contacted a blogger who specializes in helping Chinese people find lost relatives. The woman said that her uncle had been living with a woman — who was known only as Hua Hua — for over a decade, but no one in the family knew anything about her background.

The blogger soon announced that he had discovered Hua Hua’s birth family. Her surname was Bu and, 13 years earlier, she left her home in the city of Jinzhong, 90 miles away. At the time she disappeared, she was a 32-year-old university graduate who had been hospitalized multiple times for schizophrenia, her brother told Chinese news outlets. Her family had reported her missing.

According to a government investigation, Ms. Bu eventually arrived in Heshun County, where she encountered Mr. Zhang. He “took her in,” the police initially said.

On social media, people accused the police of using a euphemism for human trafficking or illegal detention.

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The government has long turned a blind eye to the trafficking of women, especially because of the country’s surplus of tens of millions of men, many of whom cannot find wives.

“For women with mental disabilities, whether or not rape has occurred no longer depends on their capacity for consent, but rather on whether the other party has successfully packaged the sexual relationship within a seemingly normal, stable and socially acceptable relationship,” a lawyer, Yan Senlin, wrote in a post that was later censored.

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