Woman Abuse in Rural Places

Walter S. DeKeseredy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000244717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

This book chronicles key contemporary developments in the social scientific study of various types of male-to-female abuse in rural places and suggests new directions in research, theory, and policy. The main objective of this book is not to simply provide a dry recitation of the extant literature on the abuse of rural women in private places. To be sure, this material is covered, but rural women's experiences of crimes of the powerful like genocidal rape and corporate violence against female employees are also examined.

Written by a celebrated expert on the subject, this book considers woman abuse in a broad context, covering forms of violence such as physical and sexual assault, coercive control genocidal rape, abortion bans, forced pregnancy, and corporate forms of violence. It offers a broad research agenda, that examines the multidimensional nature of violence against rural women. Drawing on decades of work in the shelter movement, with activist organizations, and doing government research, DeKeseredy punctuates the book with stories and voices of perpetrators and survivors of abuse. Additionally, what makes this book unique is that it focuses on the plight of rural women around the world and it introduces a modified version of Liz Kelly's original continuum of sexual violence.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, women's studies, cultural studies, policing, geography and all those interested in learning about the abuse women face in rural areas.

Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He has published 26 books, over 100 refereed journal articles, and 90 scholarly book chapters on issues such as woman abuse, rural criminology, and criminological theory.

Chapter 1

Current controversies in conceptualizing rural and woman abuse

Defining rural is no easy task, and this may explain why most people in administrative positions prefer to define it by what it is not rather than by what it is. More specifically, the designation of rural is often treated as the residual space that cannot be defined as urban.

(Fulkerson & Thomas, 2016a, p. 2)

Most, if not all, social scientists who study rural societies agree with the above claim. They also concur with another one of Fulkerson and Thomas’ assertions:

When people think about rural life they tend to envision a range of images from romantic pastoral and agricultural landscapes to the degraded aftermath of a mountain removal, the hilarity of backward rural characters on situational comedies, or the grotesque images projected by rural horror films of crazed murderers and inbred monsters. ¹

(2016a, p. 1)

What accounts for the ongoing hegemony of these images? There are, of course, no simple answers to this question, but the mass media, including the internet, definitely play a key role (DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, & Donnermeyer, 2014; Donnermeyer & DeKeseredy, 2014; Fulkerson & Thomas, 2016b). As well, some of the above characterizations are perpetuated and legitimated by prominent politicians, especially in the US (DeKeseredy, 2019a). Consider the 2016 US presidential election. Democratic candidates ignored rural white communities because of “the assumption … that rural white voters are racist and illiberal and intolerant” (Pruitt as cited in Kaori Gurley, 2015, p. 1).

Another contributing factor is that a growing number of people are now born in urban places and thus rely mainly on secondary sources of information about rural people and rural life (Fulkerson & Thomas, 2016a). Actually, the world’s population is now a majority urban population (Donnermeyer, 2016a). For these and other reasons, it is not surprising that rural social scientists devote much writing space to debunking myths about rural people, rural communities, and rural cultures. Rural criminologists constitute one such group of scholars, and they are well known for challenging the urban bias of orthodox criminology. One of their most important achievements is empirically demonstrating that rural rates of crime, in general, may be higher than urban rates at particular types of rural place and for specific kinds of crime (Donnermeyer, 2016b), one of which is violence against women. If truth be told, the rates of all types of intimate violence against women in US rural places are higher than those of their urban and suburban counterparts (DeKeseredy, 2019b; DeKeseredy, Hall-Sanchez, Dragiewicz, & Rennison, 2016). Moreover, the national Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health found that rates of violence against young women living in remote/very remote areas are the highest, and they are the lowest for those living in major cities (Dillon, Hussain, Kibele, Rahman, & Loxton, 2016). Nonetheless, one would be hard-pressed to read, hear, or see anything about these realities in the mainstream mass media (DeKeseredy et al., 2014).

Popular films, documentaries, news stories, and TV shows may portray rural women as weak, unintelligent, seductive, or strong, but only rarely do they present the experiences of women like Marie, a rural southeast Ohio woman interviewed by DeKeseredy and Schwartz (2009):

Well, him and his friend got me so wasted. They took turns with me and I remembered most of it, but, um, there was also drugs involved. Not as much on my behalf as theirs. I was just drunk. And I did remember most of it, and the next morning I woke up feeling so dirty and so degraded and then it ended up getting around that I was the slut … And in my eyes that was rape, due to the fact that I was so drunk. And I definitely did not deserve that. And I was hurting. I was hurting the next day.

(p. 68)

Marie’s experience is not an isolated incident. Rather, it is a common feature of many rural women’s lives around the world, and one of the main objectives of this book is to put the voices of rural female survivors of male interpersonal violence, state-perpetrated violence, and corporate violence at the forefront of progressive criminological inquiry. Achieving this goal would have been a major challenge 20 years ago. Now, due in large part to the empirical, theoretical, and policy work done by feminist scholars since the latter part of the last decade, there is a wealth of social scientific information on rural women’s experiences of behaviors that exist on Kelly’s (1987; 1988) continuum of sexual violence, as well as on brutal acts of violence that are not included in it. The continuum is defined further on in this chapter, but it is first necessary to review debates surrounding defining the concept of rural.

Definition of rural ²

For highly seasoned rural criminologists, this statement is painfully obvious but worth stating nonetheless: not all rural communities are alike (Donnermeyer & DeKeseredy, 2014). Still, one would likely not know this if his or her reading of rural criminology is based solely on reviews of US National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data. For example, analyses of NCVS statistics on geographic variations in violence against women done by Rennison, DeKeseredy, and Dragiewicz (2012; 2013) and DeKeseredy, Dragiewicz, and Rennison (2012) involved using an NCVS variable ³ that divides US areas into “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural” places based on categories determined by the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB). OMB classifies metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) as “central city,” “outside central city,” and “nonmetropolitan areas.” ⁴ What these researchers did is common, but is now subject to much critique, given that rural criminology has advanced far beyond its first era (1931–1973) and is now less celebratory and much more self-critical (DeKeseredy & Rennsion, in press). ⁵

The procedure for classifying MSAs dates back to 1949 when the Bureau of the Budget (the predecessor of the current OMB) first elaborated what were roughly the same general criteria used today in the US. Since then, at bare minimum, an MSA is a single county containing an urban area with 50,000 or more residents with adjacent counties added once a certain level of intercounty economic integration is reached. The OMB created its standards for defining MSAs for the sole purpose of having a consistent basis on which to compare metropolitan areas. There is no indication that OMB ever intended for the standardized geographic areas to be atomized into the urban, suburban, and rural component parts seen in existing research. Although updated MSA classification criteria are usually implemented following the decennial census (with changes mostly about the rules regarding adjoining counties or the merging of MSAs), the OMB never suggested that it is appropriate to draw subcategories from the standard unit it created. The terms “suburb,” “suburban,” and “rural” are never mentioned in those updates, and the updates make no reference to an “inside central city” – “outside central city” dichotomy that would imply a meaningful difference between the two (Dubois et al., 2019).

The NCVS’ operational definition of geographic variations is problematic on several grounds, one of which is that the “rural,” “suburban,” and “urban” are not discrete categories and should not be treated as such. Noted by Dubois et al. (2019), among others (e.g., Donnermeyer & DeKeseredy, 2014), there is tremendous diversity within these three areas. For example, nonmetropolitan places vary considerably on numerous socioeconomic indicators, including the persistence of poverty (Miller & Weber, 2004), attractiveness to retirees (Brown & Glasgow, 2008), deterioration of civic engagement (Besser, 2009), level and complexity of social service needs (Heflin & Miller, 2012), racial and ethnic segregation (Lichter, Parisi, Grice, & Taquino, 2007), and economic dependence on manufacturing, agriculture, mineral, and petroleum extraction, recreation, or government services (Kusmin, 2016).

Similarly, within the “urban” areas, there is substantial variation in central cities’ per capita spending (Chernick, Langley, & Reschovsky, 2015), sustainable development (Cloutier, Larson, & Jambeck, 2014), urban blight (Hortas-Rico, 2015), population density (Knapp, Lewis, & Schindewolf, 2014), gentrification (Christafore & Leguizamon, 2016), and economic competitiveness (Hartley, Kaza, & Lester, 2016). Research on the variation within NCVS “suburban” areas is even more specific in regard to their locational heterogeneity. Depending upon the method of data reduction used, as many as ten different types of “suburbs” have been identified in the spaces outside the central cities but within MSAs (Dubois et al., 2019; Mikelbank, 2004).

Fulkerson and Thomas (2016a) refer to definitions such as those employed by the NCVS as administrative definitions. For them, they are also essentialist because:

they do not involve asking people if they think they personally are rural, instead forcing upon them a classification based on the location of their mailbox. It is not up to those who hold administrative posts to decide whether or not rural is a label that can be attached to a particular place or person. Everyday people – workers, citizen, and consumers – also hold the power to decide when and how to apply the term rural or urban to a particular place or person. As a matter of personal identity, one may identify as a rural or urban person, rustic or urbane, and nobody truly has the power to intervene and object to such self-identification.

(p. 3)

Fulkerson and Thomas offer a constructivist critique of administrative definitions of rural. ⁶ Perhaps Jonassen (1991) provides the most succinct delineation of this school of thought:

Constructivism … claims that reality is constructed by the knower based upon mental activity. Humans are perceivers and interpreters who construct their own reality through engaging in those mental activities … thinking is ground in perception of physical and social experiences, which can only be comprehended by the mind. What the mind process are mental models that explain to the knower what he or she has perceived … We all conceive of the external reality somewhat differently, based on our unique set of experiences with the world and our beliefs about them.

(p. 10)

Administrative definitions of place are not limited to the US and are commonly used in Australia. One prime example is the Section of State (SOS) Structure of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard. It divides urban into two categories (major urban, other urban) and does the same for rural (bounded locality, rural balance) (Harris & Harkness, 2016). Also found in Australia are constructivist offerings such as that from Scott and Hogg (2015). They contend that “the rural must be understood as more (and also less) than a mere tangible physical space or environment: it comprises also mental spaces or ‘symbolic landscapes’ which condition everyday thought and action” (p. 172).

Not all definitions of place fall under the categories of “administrative” and “constructivist.” Harris (2016) offers a novel approach. She views rural areas as places and spaces. For Harris, places are “fixed geographic locations” that could be measured using administrative research techniques (Harris & Harkness, 2016). Spaces, however, are “practiced places” (de Certeau, 1984) that are, as Harris (2016) puts it:

created and shaped by the actors that occupy places and actions that occur there at any given moment. Spaces are fora where philosophies, identities, power and control are expressed and resisted, and so any study of space involves a study of both the practical and ideological components of an area.

(p. 70)

Other definitions of rural could be reviewed here, and many readers are now probably (and impatiently) asking, “What, is the best definition of rural?” Woods (2011) provides the first answer to this question: “The varied definitions and meanings that have been attributed to rural space have made the rural into an ambiguous and complex concept. The rural is a messy and slippery idea that eludes easy definition and demarcation” (p. 1). Similarly, Scott, Hogg, Barclay, and Donnermeyer (2007) remind us that:

Rurality is a considerably more unstable, diverse and fragmented phenomenon than is commonly perceived. There is no absolute and definitive distinction between either the conceptual or geographic boundaries of urban and rural areas, or metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas.

(p. 3)

So, there is no best or uniform definition, and Harris and Harkness (2016) are correct to note that “manufacturing one” is not a useful way to understand crime and social control in rural Australia and elsewhere. They also sensitize us to the fact that rural criminologists embrace approaching crime in rural places in a wide range of ways, depending on their disciplinary background, the data sets available to them, and other factors. For example, Callie Rennison and her two colleagues can easily be criticized for using the NCVS administrative coding scheme to examine geographic variations in violence against women (See DeKeseredy et al., 2012; Rennison et al., 2012; 2013). However, there were no alternative ways of doing their work at the time they did their analyses. The vast majority of US studies done prior to theirs were qualitative and involved interviews with relatively small samples of rural female survivors (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2009). Consequently, many researchers, especially those who are male positivists, questioned whether the results of these small-scale studies could be generalized to much larger populations. The only way to respond to this was to use NCVS data and employ its definition of place. Rennison ...