The 60-year-old man was sentenced to ten months imprisonment on Tuesday for a slew of assaults on his Chinese wife whom he met over the internet.

The 37-year-old Chinese woman married her Swedish husband and moved with the her now ten-year-old son to the countryside near Eksjö in Småland in southern Sweden.

Soon after the brutal assaults against the woman began. According to the charges sheet her ex-husband humiliated her by cutting off her hair, shut her in a sauna, stamped on her head and administered regular beatings.

The man was previously served with a restraining order, which he repeatedly violated. At one point he travelled to China and instructed the abused woman’s parents to call her and talk her around.

The woman meanwhile lived in constant fear of being thrown out of Sweden if she did not remain married to the man.

But eventually her Swedish husband filed for divorce in revenge for her reporting the repeated attacks to the police and her nightmare scenario became a reality after her work and residency permits were revoked.

The Migration Board has now decided to enforce regulations that stipulate that she, and her son, be deported back to China.

“We have appealed the deportation ruling to the Migration Court,” said the woman’s lawyer, Uno Carlsson. The district court decision will be forward to the Migration Court to support the woman’s appeal.

“But her ex-husband has also written to them and requested that she be deported from the country,” Carlsson said.

The completed divorce meant that the woman and her children no longer had any connection to Sweden and according to general praxis had no legal right to remain in the country.

The case is far from unique in Sweden with a 2008 study conducted by the National

Organisation for Women’s and Girls’ shelters in Sweden (Riksorganisationen för kvinnojourer och tjejjourer i Sverige – ROKS) finding 515 cases of abused foreign wives recorded in a single year, the Dagens Nyheter daily reports.

“There are women who choose to return to their husbands and endure the two years needed to avoid deportation,” said Malin Olsson of ROKS to the newspaper.

According to Swedish immigration law in order to avoid deportation the established connection to Sweden must exceed two years.