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Horrific footage of women being assaulted in a restaurant in China has triggered a debate over misogynistic violence in the country.
Nine men brutally assaulted a group of four females in a restaurant after one resisted to being sexually harassed.
In the footage, captured on CCTV in the northeastern city of Tangshan, a man is seen walking over to a seated woman and putting his hand on her back.
When she pushes his hand away, he continues to stand over her, striking her in the face when she asks him to leave.
Several more men join the violence and attack them, with one being beaten with a chair and another dragged from the restaurant by her hair.
It happened at around 2.40am on June 10, according to reports.
Two women sustained non-life-threatening injuries and were being treated in hospital, according to officials.
All nine suspects involved in the case had been arrested as of Saturday afternoon and an investigation is under way, according to an update from police.
The footage spread like wildfire on Chinese social media and shines a spotlight on violence against women in China.
On Weibo, which has more than half a million users, discussion of the video took up the six top trending topic slots.
In a brief online commentary, state television called for the suspects to be severely punished.
A widely shared WeChat post on Saturday took issue with the initial official framing of the assault as a simple act of violence.
The anonymous post said: ‘This happened in a society where violence against women is rampant …To ignore and suppress the perspective of gender is to deny the violence that people – as women – suffer.’
China Women’s News, published by the All-China Women’s Federation, said in a commentary on Saturday that ‘there can only, and must only, be zero tolerance for such vicious cases of serious violations of women’s rights and interests’.
In February, the plight of a woman in Feng county, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, sparked a public outcry after she appeared chained by the neck in a video on social media that went viral.
The shocking footage of the woman, who was reportedly kept in a garden hut while her husband and children lived in a house, horrified social media users.
The response from officials was initially muted but the Communist Party eventually carried out an investigation under public pressure.
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