Trouble At Home.

Li Jia, a tall, skinny 16-year-old from the countryside of northern China, remembers when her mother finally screwed up the courage to leave her abusive husband. Mother and daughter fled to a relative's house, but Dad kept calling. One day, he apologized. "He cried, and my mom also cried," the teenager told NEWSWEEK. "And then she brought me back." As dusk set in that night, her parents began fighting again and her father turned violent. Enraged, he grabbed a can of gasoline and splashed it all over their small house. When Li's mother protested, he threw gasoline on her--and emptied the rest of the can onto Li. He then lit a match, dropped it and ran from the house, closing the door behind him. Li escaped, but her mother was burned to death.

Now Li lives in a dirty, dimly lit hospital room in the industrial city of Shenyang, Liaoning province, not far from her hometown. Her face is covered with scars and blisters. Her hands are claws. Not so long ago, she would have faced permanent suffering and a life on the streets. Her father may have been punished, or could just as easily have slipped back into a normal life. Instead, in a rare sign of progress, lawyers from the Communist Party-controlled women's federation helped send Li's father to prison. And they're trying to raise money so the girl can get plastic surgery.

After centuries of ignoring abuse against women, China is finally confronting a massive domestic-violence problem. According to government surveys, one in three husbands hits his wife or children. Chinese women suffer the highest suicide rates of any women in the world--a fact some believe is directly related to spousal abuse.

China long considered domestic violence a matter for families to resolve themselves, but that began to change in 1995, when Beijing hosted the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women. Since then there has been evidence of real action: the government last year gave women the right to sue for divorce on the ground of abuse, and state television broadcast a popular show designed to raise awareness of domestic violence. Last summer a women's group set up a special hot line in Beijing and plastered posters across the city urging victims to call in. Hundreds did. "At least now women realize that being abused is unfair," says Guo Jianmei, head of the Beijing University Center for Women's Law Studies and Legal Services. "Before 1998 or so, women didn't come here to talk about domestic violence. Maybe they would talk about divorce. They might even have scars. But they wouldn't mention ...