“Katie” was hoping to share a moment of happiness when she posted a video of her dancing with her American husband on the video-sharing app Douyin last year.

Instead, the 28-year-old from Hebei, who asked to go by a pseudonym, received nothing but vitriol: “They said things like ‘easy girl’ and ‘she’s with a foreigner only because his d-ck is big,’” she recalls. “They said, ‘You are betraying the country.’”

Fearing more bigoted comments, Katie deleted her video after a few hours, and used Douyin’s complaint function to report one of the offending accounts. A reply came quickly from the platform: They’d stopped the user from commenting on all videos on Douyin for just under a month. “It’s not enough to make me feel better, but at least it’s something.” A lifetime ban would have been more appropriate, Katie argues.

China’s internet may be one of the most strictly regulated in the world, but online abuse is still a serious problem. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences conducted last year found that 30 percent of young people in China had experienced cyberbullying, known as wangluo baoli (网络暴力) or wangbao (网暴) for short.

In another survey of 1,500 high school students, conducted by Zhou Zongkui, a professor of psychology at the Central China Normal University, 57 percent said they had been affected by abusive comments. Government policies, like real-name registration for social media users, seem to have had limited impact in stemming the violence.

For victims, it’s sometimes difficult to know where to turn. Online abuse continues to exist in a legal gray area in China, as it does in many other countries. Under Chinese law, posting “obscene” material online can lead to a fine or criminal detention, but what constitutes “obscene” is not clearly defined; there are no specific laws criminalizing cyberbullying.