After a video circulated online Monday purportedly showing a man assaulting his wife, police in southern China’s Guangdong province announced Tuesday that they had already detained the man over the weekend for the alleged attack.

In a statement, authorities in the city of Heshan said that the 43-year-old man, surnamed Chen, had been detained Saturday after his wife, surnamed Yao, reported the incident from a local hospital the day before. According to the statement, Yao had sustained minor injuries following the attack on May 17.

On Monday, a short clip surfaced online that appears to show a man in his underwear beating and kicking a woman as a crying child tries to intervene. Viewed millions of times on microblogging platform Weibo as of Friday, the video also shows the woman setting up the camera just before the attack begins.

China’s domestic violence law, which went into effect in March 2016, prohibits physical and psychological violence against spouses, children, and the elderly. Courts can also issue “personal safety protection orders” — the country’s term for restraining orders — to deter suspected abusers from contacting their victims. However, awareness of the law remains low, and the substantial evidence required to secure such an order has been an obstacle for many plaintiffs. Between March 2016 and December 2018, Chinese courts granted 3,718 personal safety protection orders to victims of domestic violence, according to the Supreme People’s Court.

On Wednesday, the Heshan branch of the All-China Women’s Federation, the country’s quasi-official women’s rights organization, said that it is providing legal assistance to Yao, who was receiving further treatment at a hospital in the provincial capital of Guangzhou as of Wednesday. When Sixth Tone called the federation on Thursday, a woman who answered the phone said that it could not disclose further details and that updates to the case would be published to the federation’s official account on social app WeChat.

Editor: Bibek Bhandari.

(Header image: Getty Images/VCG)