Rural Woman Abuse Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The abuse of women in rural communities takes many forms. This essay focuses on intimate partner violence and forms of emotional abuse including threatening and intimidating behavior that may qualify as assault in a court of law.

With a few exceptions researchers have often ignored intimate partner violence and abuse in rural communities. There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect. It is not easy to study rural communities and people who live in rural areas tend to be suspicious of outsiders. Even telephone surveying is more difficult in rural communities because rural telephone subscription rates are lower than their urban counterparts. In addition, there is often a presumption that rural regions are more tranquil and less violent, and researchers may not have considered the possibility that intimate partner violence is a likely occurrence. However, it is clear that although crimes such as robbery and aggravated assault are much lower in rural communities, intimate partner violence occurs at rates similar to those found in urban centers.

Rural battered women talk of both physical and geographical isolation. Some complain of having no friends. Public transportation is limited, and it is sometimes difficult to engage in community life, especially if a batterer controls access to the family vehicle or the woman cannot drive. It is important to remember that sometimes batterers select the social and physical isolation in rural settings to make it easier to regulate their families and partners.

Isolation also affects how battered women deal with their abusive situations. Fleeing a home in a remote rural location is a very different proposition from leaving an urban residence. Without a telephone or with limited cell phone reception, calling the police is often more challenging for a rural battered woman. These effects of isolation vary greatly by region. For example, battered women living up a hollow in rural Kentucky will face challenges different from those living in rural Montana or upstate New York. In parts of rural Alaska, regardless whether battered women have access to a phone, it may take police up to a week to reach a remote location if the weather is severe. Isolation clearly affects battered women’s survivability. The longer it takes emergency medical personnel to attend a life-threatening act of domestic violence, the greater a woman’s chance of dying.

Researchers often find more stereotypical gender roles in rural communities and these sometimes invite, feed, or compound woman abuse. It is also the case that rural women earn less in comparison with rural men than urban women in comparison with urban men. A rural woman’s diminished economic opportunities may limit her ability to survive independently of a violent man. Given the dearth of well-paid jobs in rural communities and the rise of the service sector over the last generation, economic opportunities for battered women who want to break free of the violence leave a lot to be desired.

These stereotypical gender roles sometimes influence rural police officers, especially those working for smaller, more poorly trained departments. These officers may be more likely than their urban peers to believe it is a man’s right to control his wife or partner’s behavior, at times condoning or turning a blind eye to violence. Ethnographic research from Kentucky supports this observation.

The illegal drug trade can also affect the policing of domestic violence cases. If police officers ignore this trade or worse still are somehow complicit in it, then it becomes more difficult for them to arrest domestic violence offenders who know of the officers’ involvement. Such compromises in policing have been reported by battered women in states such as Arizona, particularly in areas close to the Mexican border where the illegal drug trade is pervasive. A similar phenomenon is found in acutely impoverished rural eastern Kentucky where occasionally batterers know of local officer acquiescence or connivance in drug manufacture and trafficking.

A “good ol’ boys” network is alive and well in parts of rural America and sometimes works against the interests of battered women. Many men have known each other for very long periods of time and if friendly with each other may be reluctant to enforce the law, jail the offender, or provide various supports for women attempting to escape violent relationships. We see these compromises more often with elected sheriffs and, perhaps to a lesser extent, with elected judges. Both groups may be less willing to enforce domestic violence laws if they depend upon an abuser’s family for votes at the next election.

With a much lower tax base, many rural communities suffer from a dearth of health and social services. Battered women may have considerable distances to travel to the nearest shelter. In rural communities where people know each well, some women report difficulties with keeping their personal information private. Word can get back to an abusive husband that his wife has shared her plight with a social worker or health worker, thus endangering her and making the construction of safety plans more challenging. With limited childcare facilities in rural communities, it is also more challenging for abused women become economically independent.

Undocumented farm working women, many of whom live and work in isolated rural communities face peculiar challenges in the event that they are battered. They often report feeling reluctant to call the police, perhaps because they fear deportation, or perhaps because they have a fear of the police from earlier experiences in the countries they came from. In some cases men who abuse migrant women claim that they are disciplining their wives rather than abusing them and that such behavior is a part of traditional cultural heritages.

Bibliography:

Bachman, R. (1994). Violence against women: A national crime victimization survey report. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Bachman, R., & Saltzman, L. (1995). Violence against women: Estimates from the redesigned survey. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Websdale, N. (1998). Rural woman battering and the justice system: An ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Websdale, N., & Johnson, B. (1997). The policing of domestic violence in rural and urban areas: The voices of battered women in Kentucky. Policing and Society, 6, 297–317.

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