Place Matters:  Intimate Abuse as a Case Study for Rural Difference

© Lisa R. Pruitt 2008*

I.	Space:  Out of sight, out of mind    
a.	Literal Space:  Can you get there from here?
b.	Social Space:  The paradox of rural privacy 
c.	Economic Space:  Sparse population, sparse opportunity
d.	Conclusion 
II.	Place:  That sort of thing doesn’t happen around here 
a.	Regional differences 
b.	Tribal settings
c.	Degrees of remoteness     
III.	Scale:  Intimate abuse as a multi-scalar phenomenon 
a.	The politics of scale
b.	The global dimension
c.	Conclusion 
IV.	Rurality as difference 

Rural places are commonly thought of as peaceful, idyllic settings where people get along.  They are also popularly perceived as safe places, where crime is rare.  In reality, the gap between rural and urban crime rates has narrowed in recent years, and arrest rates for some offenses are higher in rural areas.  Among these are crimes against family members.        
In fact, the overall picture regarding intimate abuse in rural places is a confusing one.  Conclusory statements to the effect that intimate violence rates are similar across urban, suburban, and rural areas were common in the literature in the 1980s and 1990s.  More recent, detailed studies suggest that a number of factors distinguish between intimate abuse in rural places and urban ones.  A 2004 study, for example, concludes that between 1984 and 2000, place was a very strong predictor of intimate partner homicide.  In particular, the less densely populated a place and the greater its distance from an urban area, the more likely a killer was a family member or intimate partner of his victim.  Consistent with those findings, a 2003 pilot study found that rural perpetrators of intimate abuse were nearly twice as likely as their urban counterparts to inflict severe physical injuries, as by using a weapon.  Almost twice as many rural assailants threatened to kill their victims, and they were 2.5 times more likely than their urban counterparts to destroy property during the event.  
While the incidence of intimate abuse in rural places, vis-à-vis urban ones, is unclear, somewhat greater clarity exists regarding the responses of rural social services, law enforcement, and judiciary.  These institutions are widely seen as less effective – indeed, often scarce or non-existent – compared to similar urban resources and institutions.  Services from basic health care to victim advocates are typically less accessible in rural locales.  Further, field research suggests reluctance on the part of rural police to respond to family violence.  Finally, studies have shown rural courts to be insufficiently informed about the phenomenon of intimate abuse, and also unresponsive to it.  
This Article investigates the difference that place – rurality in particular – makes regarding the incidence, investigation, arrest, and prosecution of intimate abuse in the United States.  It draws on data about and studies of intimate abuse that have considered the rural/urban axis.  Among these sources are Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) grants and assessments targeted at rural and tribal communities.  
I use critical geography’s principal tools – space, place, and scale -- to frame analysis of this data.  “Space” is a broad concept that refers both to the familiar idea of physical surroundings and to the impact that particular spatial configurations have on many aspects of life, from social relationships to economic opportunity.  In short, space is to geography what time is to history as vector of analysis. “Place” and “scale” are subsets of space.  A place-based analysis considers particular locales, taking into account how they are distinct from one another.  “Scale” refers to units of measure of space and place.  Examples include the body, the household, the region, and the globe. 
These geographic concepts may be particularly useful in thinking about rural women, whose spatial situation (away from people, services, jobs, the political arena) renders them largely invisible to legal actors and, indeed, to broader society.  Thinking about rural locales places in terms of their spatial characteristics thus seems a natural fit.  But critical geography goes beyond considering physical space.  In Part I, I use the concept of “space” also to assess the social and economic constructions of rural spatiality.  Part II on “place” explores the spatial, cultural, and other distinctions among rural locales.  Doing so reveals, for example, the significance of remoteness and population density among the wide variety of places popularly designated or thought of as “rural.”  I also consider intimate abuse in tribal contexts, as well as in the context of rural communities that are newly multi-ethnic.  When law engages critical geography, discussions of scale often implicate boundaries and jurisdiction.  Part III on “scale” demonstrates the multi-scalar character of intimate abuse in relation to rurality and argues that legal responses to it should also originate from various scales or at various jurisdictions.               

I.	Space:  Out of sight, out of mind.   

Space, critical geographers’ most universal and abstract concept, refers both to the familiar idea of physical surroundings and to the impact that particular spatial configurations have on other aspects of life.  Individuals, institutions, and networks are spatiality’s agents.  They are frequently aware of how space enables or disables them and take such spatial features into account in their decisions and actions.  Their decisions and actions, in turn, modify spatial structures.  Rural sociologist Marc Mormont writes of the social construction of rurality and sees identity “primarily in relation to space … because it is by the practical apprehension of a structured space that the individual first becomes aware of the world and learns to define his or her position within it.”  
A number of factors that set rural intimate abuse apart from the urban phenomenon are spatial in one way or another.  These include geographic and social isolation, the more entrenched nature of rural patriarchy, severe economic disadvantage, and lack of social services.  I have similarly argued that literal physical isolation from sources of assistance may both aggravate women’s vulnerability and create barriers to effective community and legal responses.  In the following parts, I take up three aspects of the enabling/disabling role of space:  (1) literal physical geography; (2) space as socially constructed; and (3) space as economically constructed.  

a.	Literal Space:  Can you get there from here?  

Physical isolation from jobs, opportunities, services, and other people defines rural living.  Such isolation can be particularly disabling for rural women, who generally have fewer resources to overcome the adversity created by spatial isolation, and who are already vulnerable to a variety of economic and physical harms.  
In relation to intimate abuse, spatial isolation may profoundly influence the actions of both batterers and their victims.  They, along with ancillary players in domestic violence scenarios, are aware of the enabling and disabling features of rural space.  Indeed, it is partly the spatial isolation that enables the perpetrator to commit the abusive acts, knowing that people who could intervene are far away.  He may also take advantage of the victim’s knowledge of the physical distance from sources of assistance – both formal (police) and informal (neighbors) – to threaten the victim and aggravate the terror inflicted upon her.  Indeed, some scholars have suggested that batterers choose to live in the country because it is conducive to abuse by fostering the victim’s social isolation.  
  Rural victims of intimate abuse are also aware that their spatial circumstances disable them.  With rural households often scattered across the countryside, many women have limited options for evading or escaping a perpetrator.  They may be unable to knock on a neighbor’s door for immediate assistance, and other means of escaping or getting assistance may also be limited.  Carol Feyen’s study of intimate abuse in a rural Wisconsin county between 1979 and 1992 indicated, for example, that 47% of victims had no access to a vehicle, and 30% had no telephone.  The sheriff’s department provided transportation for about 20% of the women who came to the county’s shelter.  [Other examples are available in the literature]
Studies of how best to respond to rural crime repeatedly note the challenges that distance presents.  Law enforcement officials are frequently unable to respond quickly to all sorts of calls.  Both physical distance and low staffing levels limit them.  Finally, spatial isolation comes into play in accessing services, which are often available only in county seats or other population centers.  Reaching such resources is time consuming and disruptive.  [Expand with more detail from various studies, an example or two].      
Physical space thus creates inequalities and disadvantage.  Rural residents are not “equal” to urban residents in terms of access to opportunities, service, and assistance.  Nor is there equality among rural residents.  Differences in race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and class play out differently in rural areas than in urban ones.  Degree of remoteness and population density are other key variables linked to disadvantage.  As a general rule, the more isolated or remote a person’s home, the greater the obstacles she will face in gaining access to education, services, and good jobs.  Such spatial inequalities have both economic and social consequences.  Among the latter are social isolation and lack of anonymity.  

b.	Social Space:  The paradox of rural privacy   

The same physical distances that enhance rural hardship and vulnerability are often viewed as creating greater expectations of privacy.  Certainly, rural residents tend to live greater distances from others than do their urban counterparts.  They may thus expect greater privacy in the sense of neighbors not being able to look in their windows; houses are set back from the road, and neighbors are physically distant.  
As a practical matter, however, rural dwellers may experience less privacy than those in cities because of the nature of rural and small-town living.  Rural residents are rarely nameless or faceless among their neighbors.  Even those living in the greatest physical seclusion will often have their habits known by others in the community.  Sparseness of population tends to produce “high density of acquaintanceship,” and such familiarity can heighten the significance of otherwise casual interactions.  Small-town gossip about private lives – particularly about those who don’t conform to community expectations – can become a form of social control.    
A 1988 study comparing welfare exits in rural and urban communities illustrates just one consequence of the lack of anonymity – a type of lack of privacy – that marks rural communities.  Finding that rural residents are likely to receive welfare for shorter periods of time, the authors attributed this in part to the greater stigma associated with reliance on public assistance among rural folk.  In relation to this stigma, the study documented awareness by welfare recipients that their status as such was essentially public knowledge.  This occurred, for example, when neighbors observed recipients using food stamps at the grocery store, or coming and going from the local social services office where applications for welfare were made.  Another study from the early 1990s documented a related phenomenon:  most rural women receiving public assistance attempted to hide that fact from neighbors, friends, and even family members.  
This lack of anonymity – effectively a lack of [information] privacy – both constitutes and is constituted by rural space.  It can enable or disable, inhibit or dis-inhibit rural residents in a variety of ways.  Some of these spatial influences have legal relevance, yet they may be unacknowledged by legal actors.  Lack of anonymity can profoundly affect rural women’s actions in an array of contexts by constructing the social spaces in which they live in ways that circumscribes their choices.  This lack of anonymity and diminished privacy may, for example, constrain young women’s use of judicial bypass procedures associated with parental notification requirements of abortion laws.  Such processes permit underage women, who would ordinarily need parental permission for an abortion, to secure permission instead from a judicial officer.  Yet young rural women who might use these procedures are likely to be known by the judicial officer or other court officials, thus deterring their use of the judicial bypass option and rendering it useless for the very purpose for which it is intended.  Indeed, such diminished privacy can effectively function as a form of duress.  
Another disabling feature of rural space for intimate abuse victims is the social isolation that often accompanies their spatial isolation and is consistent with their lack of anonymity.  Social isolation, which is widely associated with intimate abuse,  may be aggravated by the rural socio-cultural milieu.  Rural places are associated with tradition, homogeneity, and consensus, and those characteristics may be manifest in a particular form of rural patriarchy which deeply entrenches gender roles.  [Expand on this as means of transitioning to next paragraph]    
Such attitudes undermine rural women’s self-confidence, thus keeping them in abusive relationships.  It may also deter women from reporting violence to the law enforcement officials.  Rural intimate abuse survivors in the Feyen study, for example, reported feeling socially isolated. They reported that their networks, including those associated with their churches, shunned them for separating from or divorcing their abusive husbands, or merely for reporting them to the police.  Traditional beliefs about gender roles may mean that rural communities are more likely to see intimate violence as a private or family issue, or even to blame the woman for its occurrence.  Such attitudes may also discourage women from seeking social service assistance, and also influence provision (or lack thereof) of victim services.  

Another consequence of lack of anonymity that may influence the victim’s decision regarding whether she should avail herself of legal assistance is law enforcement officers’ familiarity with both perpetrators and victims.   Feyen found that an abuser’s relationship to with the law enforcement officer influenced that officer’s response to the call.  
Data on rural courts’ handling of applications for protection orders against batterers reveals similar relationship-based biases.  [A 1991 study was titled “Not in My County” because the dominant response to the problem of intimate abuse was denial.]  Rural court personnel surveyed admitted to feeling awkward when faced with having to protect someone they know in a town where everyone knows each other. Judges and staff reported finding it difficult to set aside their knowledge of the parties, making it is easier to perceive domestic violence as “having trouble” rather than assault.  Court staff also indicated their stereotypes of abusers as low-income men with criminal records, not “charming, responsible man,” or “nice guys,” they know in the community.  [Other more recent studies]  
[Transition]  As a related matter, the punishment for intimate abuse also varies between rural and urban places.  A 2001 study of domestic violence arrestees found that 60% of urban offenders were ordered into anger management counseling, while no rural offenders were.  Rural offenders were occasionally ordered into marriage counseling (17%), while urban offenders never were.  
[Transition]  

c.	Economic Space:  Sparse population, sparse opportunity  

[Section to be considerably bolstered, as this is arguably the most compelling consideration for women].  
Victims of intimate abuse may also experience social isolation in relation to their financial circumstances.  In many rural locales, poverty is high and intergenerational, local economies lack diversity, and jobs are scarce and scattered.  Rural women typically earn much less than their male counterparts, and their overall financial circumstances are often precarious for several reasons.  Because of limited labor markets and educational deficits, rural women have particularly poor prospects for employment that will permit them to support themselves and their children.  Job training services are rare; even community colleges are out of reach for many rural residents.  A dearth of rural housing options further deters women from reporting and leaving abusers.  
These realities mean that many rural women seeking economic self-sufficiency in the absence of a male wage-earner will likely be forced to accept public assistance.  As of 1999, 42% of working female-headed households in rural America lived in poverty, and half of those had incomes that were less than half the poverty threshold.  Yet, consistent with the rural value of self-sufficiency, studies have documented obloquy attached to receipt of public assistance there.  These and other dire economic consequences of separation or divorce are thus likely to deter women from leaving abusive relationships.        
While intimate abuse has economic consequences for women, it also has economic cause.   Rural economic restructuring – a consequence of an increasingly globalized economy—has created insecurity that tends to destabilize families and increase the incidence of domestic violence.  Rural economies are less resilient in the face of globalization, in part because of lack of economic diversification in particular locales.  They may also suffer more from globalization because they are physically isolated from markets (even from good roads), have little human capital  and thus are not competitive for new economic development.  [Conclude]  

d.	Conclusion 

Consideration of rural characteristics reveals some ways in which geography influences the incidence and reporting of intimate abuse, as well as the state’s responses to it.  Some of these characteristics are literally spatial, like the physical distances that impede the work of law enforcement officers and which enhance women’s physical vulnerability.  Others, such as conservative attitudes about women’s roles and the lack of anonymity that may inhibit women from pursuing legal remedies, are socio-spatial.  Yet others are economic – or more precisely, spatio-economic.  All influence legal outcomes.  Both lack of anonymity and spatial isolation are powerful influences with tangible economic and social consequences for rural residents.  These characteristics and phenomena constitute rural spaces, just as the characteristics themselves are reciprocally constituted by rurality.  

II.	Place:  That sort of thing doesn’t happen around here.  
	[Introduction] 
	 
a.	Regional Differences
•	Appalachia – extreme rural patriarchy, gun culture
•	Mid-West
[An example of this relates to family farming, which is still important in some regions of the country, including the Midwest.  Feyen’s study of domestic abuse in rural Wisconsin, for example, revealed that place-related concerns of this nature influenced women’s decisions whether or not to remain with abusive spouses.  Some women reported not seeking help or pursuing divorce because they did not want to be vilified by their neighbors when divorce and attendant division of property necessitated selling the family farm.  Their own attachments to the land, the animals, and the farm lifestyle, as well as concern that their children also have an opportunity to farm, led them to remain in abusive relationships.]   

b.	Tribal Settings
•	American Indian women are the only group more likely to be raped or assaulted by a stranger than by an intimate
•	Extreme economic disadvantage  

c.	Degrees of Remoteness 
•	As a predictor of deadly intimate violence.  
•	The examples of Alaska, where services may be hundreds of miles away; perhaps also refer to Appalachia again  

III.	Scale:  Intimate abuse as a multi-scalar phenomenon   

In critical geography terms, “scale” refers to the degree of resolution or the unit at which a phenomenon is studied.  In legal contexts, discussions of scale often implicate jurisdiction; that is, the roles that law plays at differing scales may be linked to jurisdictional limitations.  Sometimes these limits stem from subject matter; sometimes they are territorial.   
While it is the criminal law of states that prohibits intimate abuse, state law is not the only law (scale) relevant to this phenomenon.  More local considerations – those at lower scales, such as city, town, county – greatly influence whether and how victims, perpetrators, and legal actors respond to the crime.  These local considerations may include, for example, law enforcement personnel staffing levels, as well as their training in relation to family violence and their familiarity with parties to domestic disputes.  Both state and local decisions will largely determine the availability of social services and physical infrastructure, such as a women’s shelter or a sufficiently large jail.  But, state and local scales are not the only ones relevant to intimate abuse.  As discussed in the following sections, national and global scales have roles both in causing intimate abuse, and in responding to it.  

a.	The Politics of Scale

In the past decade, feminist legal scholars have taken up the gendered implications of jurisdiction.   The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in United States v. Morrison prompted much of the feminist critique.  The Morrison Court struck down the civil rights remedy for domestic violence that Congress had included in the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA).  In doing so, the Court rejected Congress’ asserted right to regulate “noneconomic” conduct under the aegis of the Commerce Clause.  The Court invoked a distinction between the “truly national” and the “truly local,” which it claimed dated to “the time the [Commerce] Clause was adopted.”  
Professor Judith Resnik incisively criticizes this purported binary between national and local elusive and inaccurate, noting the many ways in which money and violence are entangled in and shape women’s lives.  She asserts that the Morrison Court’s “categorical federalism” relies upon “old images of state boundaries” and “worn equations of jurisdiction and gender.”  Resnik instead advocates a “multifaceted federalism” that treats such categories as “neither exclusive nor necessarily enduring” given their ambiguity.  Resnik’s multifaceted federalism claims that governance does not reside at just one site.  The inevitable consequence of this approach is to create a more accountable government, one that “interrogate[s] current practices, and [imagines] new ones.”  Applying this thinking to Morrison, Resnik proclaims the achievement of VAWA was not that “‘the national’ replaced local antiviolence work.”  Rather, it was that the federal civil rights remedy and other aspects of the law “derived from and supplemented such work, mostly through substantial funding of local programs and symbolically through announcing national rights of personal security for women.”  
Resnik elsewhere expanded upon her analysis of Morrison to deconstruct notions of jurisdiction, which she argues is gendered.  Resnik challenges us to think about how women are treated in the allocation of jurisdiction – power – between federal and state courts.  She challenges consideration of how jurisdictional allocation of cases affects our understanding of whether certain problems belong to women, others to men.  While the Court’s categorical federalism inquires into who has power within a particular level of court or government body to determine the gender implications within the jurisdiction, Resnik’s approach collaborates across scales – “among women, between women and men, and across levels of government.”  
b.	The Global Dimension

Not only is intimate abuse not a “truly local” issue, its causes and consequences are also not circumscribed by national borders.  Global processes are at play, too, as illustrated by studies that have linked intimate abuse with economic hardship, a consequence of globalization and corresponding gender role modification.  Deborah Weissman has written about the link between economic uncertainty and intimate abuse, asserting that the new global economy, with its attendant economic uncertainty, has intruded upon household “micro-processes.”  When global economic forces wreak havoc on local economies, the financial consequences for individual families correlate with an increased incidence of domestic violence.  Other scholars have similarly observed that “the private behaviors of couples in their homes cannot be separated either from their local neighborhood settings or from the larger political economy.” 
Economic uncertainty, Weissman explains, creates “chronic stress, instability, and fear” in households, neighborhoods, and communities.  All of those factors are associated with domestic violence.  Insecurity corrodes a sense of community identity, leading to pervasive desperation there.  As economic transitions impact communities, Weissman notes, “traditional family structures” collapse, leading to instability within the household and increased domestic violence.  A man’s inability to fulfill the male gender role of wage-earner can contribute to a feeling of emasculation, which in turn may cause him to compensate with a hyper-masculine performance, one manifestation of which is intimate abuse.  

c.	Conclusion 

Other challenges associated with responses to intimate abuse in rural locales have already been mentioned.  These include lack of resources in terms of law enforcement personnel, ancillary services, and physical infrastructure.  The source of solutions to these apparently local problems need not also be local, however.  Federal funding for local programs that respond to violence against women remains part of VAWA.  Such attention to intimate abuse at the national level, Resnik observes, makes a powerful statement about the importance of women and their security.  It also provides material assistance, which may be especially valuable in rural communities with long-standing deficiencies in law enforcement and ancillary services.    
Thinking about how space and place shape the lives of rural women invites attention at various scales, including the operation of law and legal actors in each.  Continuing associations of rurality with the local and isolated are no longer entirely accurate.  Global economic forces buffet those in rural locales, too, where entrenched patriarchy and lack of opportunity, spatial isolation and lack of anonymity further aggravate women’s vulnerability.  Yet rural associations with the local, as well as with isolation, independence, and self-sufficiency, may be used to justify the “hands off” stance of national – and even state – law and policy-makers.  Such decision makers must see that solutions – legal and otherwise – to the economic and social woes of rural communities, like the woes themselves, are multi-scalar.  They must emanate out from, while also nesting around, a given rural locale.     

IV.	Rurality as Difference 

Thinking about the characteristics of rural places reveals some ways in which geography distinguishes these locales from the urban, which has become the implicit norm of both law-making and scholarship.  Some characteristics are literally spatial, like the physical distances that impede the work of law enforcement officers, make victim and support services less accessible, and enhance women’s physical vulnerability.  Others, such as the conservative attitudes about women’s roles and the lack of anonymity that may inhibit women from pursuing legal remedies are socio-spatial.  Yet others are about economic survival.  All influence legal outcomes.  [Expand]