Remembering Peng Wan-ru: DPP Reflects on Women's Affairs Director's Murder
Almost 30 years ago, the murder of Peng Wan-ru, then-director of the Democratic Progressive Party's women's affairs department, sparked massive calls for better protections for women's rights. On the UN Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, TaiwanPlus speaks with the DPP's Gender Equality Director, Lee Yen-jong, to learn about the country's progress since Peng's killing.
Back then, Peng Wan-ru was the first director of the Women's Department Development of DPP or Democratic Progressive Party. And before she worked at DPP, she also worked for several prominent feminist organizations in Taiwan.
She joined DPP because she wanted to bring the movement, feminist movement into politics. By the time she was murdered back then, I would say that she was putting lots of energy in promoting a gender quota of one fourth inside DPP.
And before she until the day she was murdered, she still tried to convince our representative and also all the political actors inside our party.
She left the hotel very late, like maybe 10:00 in the evening or even later. And she entered this taxi and then she was murdered that night.
And the next day, December 1st, 1996, there was the National Congress of DPP.
And that was supposed to be the day that all our party representatives to vote for this proposal. But they waited on-site until maybe like 10:00, but she was not there.
They have been searching for, I think, two days. And at the end her body was found in the suburb area of Kaohsiung County back then. She was murdered and she was raped and she was stabbed maybe more than 30 times.
So that was a shock, totally shock for Taiwanese society.
I think, December 21st the same year, there was a huge march, huge demonstration, organizing a lot of people, all the political actors in different parties and all the feminist activists. And that was a huge demonstration in Taipei.
So afterwards, Taiwanese parliament, we passed some several very, I would say milestone bills for women's protection, lik a code for the prevention of domestic violence and also code for prevention of sexual assaults.
Peng Wan-ru was murdered 29 years ago. Of course, we had some improvement in social awareness of victims of domestic violence and also the victims of sexual assault. After Peng Wan-ru's death, I think people got to understand that sexual assault was really, really an issue in Taiwan. And our government started to put some resources and pass some legislation to implement this system to protect our victims.
The policemen, prosecutors and social workers, the people, the professionals who receive victims on frontlines, they had more training to deal with the trauma of victims and also in the way they communicate with the victims. I think something very important. Now, our system is much friendly compared to the one we had 30 years ago. But we still have a lot of improvement to do. But still this we need to give the government credit for that.
