Domestic Violence (DV) Service Provision and the Architecture of Rural Life: an Australian Case Study

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Owen, Santi& Carrington, Kerry (2015) Domestic violence (DV) service provision and the architecture of rural life: An Australian case study. Journal of Rural Studies, 39, pp. 229-238.

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Domestic Violence (DV) Service Provision and the Architecture of Rural Life: An Australian Case Study

Santi Owen Phd graduate, School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Tel: +856(2) 2812 2971; Email: [email protected]

Kerry Carrington School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Tel: +61 (7) 3138 7112 Email: [email protected]

Highlights  This paper examines domestic violence service provision in rural Australia.  Shame is a significant deterrent to service use by rural women.  Family privacy pose unique operating challenges for rural service providers.  Rural services must overcome barriers imposed by geographical distance.  Service models are urbancentric and ignore the architecture of rural life.

Abstract

This article uses the concept of the architecture of rural life to analyse domestic violence service provision in rural Australia. What is distinctive about this architecture is that it polices the privacy of the rural family. A tight cloak of silence is carved around instances of domestic violence. Imagined threats to rural safety are seen as coming from outsiders (i.e. urban influences or Indigenous), not insiders within rural families. This article draws on key findings from a study conducted in rural New South Wales, Australia. The study interviewed 49 rural service providers working in human services and the criminal justice system. The application of architecture of rural life as a conceptual tool demonstrates challenges with service provision in a rural setting. The main results of this study found that this architecture operates as a silencing form of social control in three distinctive ways. Firstly, shame about being a victim of domestic violence encourages rural women’s complicity in remaining silent. Secondly, family privacy maintains a veil of silence that accentuates rural women’s social and economic dependency on men. Thirdly, community sanctions act as a deterrent to women seeking help.

Keywords Rural service provision Domestic violence Rural social order

1. Introduction

This article is based on a study into the way the peculiarities of rural life in Australia impact on the quality, efficiency and availability of domestic violence (DV) service provision. It begins by explaining why any singular definition of rurality remains illusory. Next it explains why the concept of the architecture of rural life has advantages over blunt rural/urban homogenising dichotomies. The distinctiveness of the rural in Australia – both as a cultural signifier about an imaginary rural landscape – and in terms of its particular socio-demography is then described. Unlike Europe, Australia is a vast sparsely settled continent at the foot of Asia in the southern hemisphere that has no history of agrarianism, but two centuries of history of white colonisation that have shaped the architecture of rural life. This article then presents the findings of a qualitative study into the challenges experienced by DV service providers in rural Australia. There is a vast gulf of difference between rural and urban Australian settlements which creates challenging consequences for the provision of DV services.

This article makes a contribution to the growing body of research that challenges the modernisation thesis. First, the construction of a crime free rural life is historically inaccurate, as violence and the use of force has been deployed by many a rural community to settle disputes, seek justice or revenge honour. Second, in contemporary Australia and America, crime rates in rural areas are much higher than commonly believed (Barclay et al, 2007; Bourke, 2000; DeKeseredy, 2011; DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2013; Hogg and Carrington, 2006; La Nauze and Rutherford, 1997; Neame and Heenan, 2004; Websdale, 1998; Women’s Services Network, 2000). The paper argues that the architecture of rural life in Australia shapes DV service provision in several unique ways. Lastly it concludes that urbancentric policy models are inadequate for addressing the issues faced by DV service providers in rural Australia.

2. Basic definitions and the theory of violence and the architecture of rural life

2.1 What is rural?

Rurality is a contested concept that remains somewhat arbitrary and open to debate (Hogg and Carrington, 2006). All definitions rely on some concept of linking spatiality with what is rural and all have their limitations (see Lockie and Bourke, 2001: 5-9). Hence the search for a singular definition is illusory (Halfacree, 1993).The main point to arise from these debates is that rurality is a considerably complex phenomenon (Cloke and Little, 1997: 1), and one that is dynamic (Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy,

2013: 5-6). Yet, the intellectual study of the rural has been obsessed with romantic images of the countryside as depicted in Figure 1. Cloke and Little suggest that rural studies have been ‘hung up on agriculture; by a fascination with the neat morphological unit of the nucleated village; by an obsession with gemeinschaft social relations; (or) by a persistent questioning of the local-newcomer schism as the key division’ (Philo, 1997: 24). These images compress the richness of rurality into an homogenising template, neglecting the existence of ‘other rurals’ (Philo, 1997: 22) that embody different socialities, sexualities, ethnicities and subjectivities. The rural/urban dichotomy is thus too crude and homogenising a concept to satisfy the requirements of a theoretical framework that might adequately grapple with these complexities. This is why we prefer to use the post-structuralist concept of the architecture of rural life as an alternative to using blunt rural/urban dichotomisations.

Photo: Owen, 2006 Figure 1: A typical image of a quiet main street in a rural Australian town often associated with a crime free community.

The architecture of rural life in Australia is as much cultural and imagined as it is physical and inscribed in rural landscapes, townships and the social ordering of everyday life. Hogg and Carrington (2006) use the term ‘the architecture of rural life’ to describe an interaction between broader historical and contemporary international, national and regional processes and localised practices. This concept, inspired by post-structuralism, refers to the ways meaning and identity are bound up and (re)articulated in rural townships and vast rural spaces that distinguish the Australian continent (Hogg and Carrington, 2006).

While cautious of homogenising constructions of rurality, the aim of this paper is to analyse how service providers of DV interventions are affected by the vagaries of the architecture of rural life in Australia. For the purposes of analysing service provider responses in a rural setting, a working definition of ‘rurality’ is operationalised by using the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) geographical standard measured as a certain distance from ‘urban’ centres (ABS, 2006). This is the measurement often used in Australian policy documents. It is called the ‘Remoteness Structure’ and differentiates between Major Cities, Inner Regional, Outer Regional, Remote and Very Remote locations (ABS, 2006). This is not an ideal instrument, but it does serve to distinguish rural and regional from urban Australia, at least spatially.

2.2 What is rural in Australia?

Australia is a vast sparsely populated continent with huge expanses of unoccupied territory, inflicted by the 'tyranny of distance' and unpredictable forces of nature - drought, flood, and bushfire. Australia is also one of the most urbanised nations in the world, with only 30 per cent of its inhabitants living outside capital cities (Dufty-Jones and Connell, 2014: 1). What is distinctive about rural Australia is that it has produced a gender order that is typically more pronounced than it is the urban settlements (Alston, 1995; Poiner, 1990). Another distinctive feature of the architecture of rural Australia is that is far less multicultural than metropolitan Australia. Australia was colonised by the British in 1788 just over 225 years ago. This history of colonisation has produced two distinctive Australian ruralities – one Indigenous and the other non-Indigenous (Cowlishaw, 1998, 2004).

Unlike Europe, Australia never had a pre-modern agrarian past. Initially it was a convict settlement – a dumping ground for the unwanted from Britain. Then it became an outpost in the southern hemisphere which presented its European colonisers with a fresh plate upon which to build ‘imaginary’ agrarian communities, based on the quaint yeoman model of settlement. That model fostered the development of towns to service the local needs of farmers and to provide transport corridors linking agriculture to markets, services and modes of government (Hogg and Carrington, 2006). But it did not work well in the harsh Australian dry climate.

Rural Australia has undergone significant change since the initial attempts at white settlement based on the Yeoman model in the 19th century. The drivers of change include the boom and bust cycles of mining extraction, technologisation of farming, globalization of production, environmental degradation and rural sustainability, the cyclical nature of rural economic decline and resurgence, challenges to land use, contestation over water rights and Native Title, and a swag of socio-cultural changes such as the growth of women’s off farm work, the decline of patrilineal property heritage, out-migration of rural youth to the cities, and the consequent aging of the rural population to name a few (Dufty-Jones and Connell, 2014; Hogg and Carrington, 2006; Lawrence, 1987; Lockie and Bourke, 2000; Pritchard and McManus, 2000). Beyond the coastal hinterlands there is only a sparse distribution of small towns, and a handful of regional centres where most government services are concentrated. The physical geography of the continent and it patterns of settlement have served to accentuate differences between rural and metropolitan localities, as well as sustain an urbancentric model of service provision. In this article will argue that this mode of policy making has particularly adverse consequences for

4 the provision of DV services in rural locations that ironically have a greater need for such services.

2.3 What is DV?

There is wide recognition that DV includes physical and sexual assault, and other forms of domination, such as economic deprivation, psychological abuse and social isolation. Over the last two decades, DV has been used in academic literature and policy circles to describe a spectrum of violence and abusive behaviours ranging from physical and sexual assaults, verbal, emotional, economic, social and spiritual abuse. In recognition of the potential lethality of DV, intimate homicide is understood as the most serious form of violence. This paper recognises that this broad typology of violence and abuse is perpetrated within a variety of interpersonal relationships, such as siblings, child and parent, care relationships and extended familial relationships. The focus here is on service provision via legal protection of victims, provision of victim support services and community-wide prevention strategies. The orientation of current Australian social policy interventions largely reflects the gendered nature of this social phenomenon where protection and support is aimed at women victims and men as offenders. Given these considerations, this paper is focused on rural human services for women experience violence perpetrated by men.

2.4 Violence and the architecture of rural Life

Traditions of scholarship in the social sciences have tended to perpetuate the myth that rural communities are relatively violence free by romanticising them as places of ‘unquestionable moral virtue’ (Lockie, 2000: 21). Similarly within criminology, most scholarly research about crime and violence has privileged urban settlement as the ideal laboratory of criminological research, neglecting the study of violence in rural contexts. It should not be surprising then that violence in rural societies has attracted little scholarly attention until recently, although there are some significant exceptions (Alston, 1997; Barclay et al., 2007; Carrington, 2007a; Coorey, 1990; DeKeseredy, 2011; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy, 2013; Hogg and Carrington, 2006; Owen and Owen, 2006; Websdale, 1998). This neglect is linked to the idea that violence is antithetical to an imagined but idealist conception of what is rural (Hogg and Carrington, 2006). The idealisation of rural life is partly the product of a set of assumptions arising from the modernisation thesis – what Tonnies referred to as the passage from a ‘Gemeinschaft’ to a ‘Gessellschaft’ society. Rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical ‘Gemeinschaft’ society, small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity. By contrast, violence, crime and disorder are misconceived in this model as the offshoots of ‘Gessellschaft’ social relations generated by modernising and urbanising processes (Tonnies, 1887). 5

This article makes a contribution to the growing body of research that challenges the modernisation thesis. First, the image of a crime free rural life is historically inaccurate, as violence and the use of force has been used in many rural communities in their settlement. Second, in contemporary Australia and America, crime rates, particularly interpersonal crime in rural areas are much higher than commonly believed (Barclay et al., 2007; Bourke, 2000; Hogg and Carrington, 2006; La Nauze and Rutherford, 1997; Neame and Heenan, 2004; DeKeseredy, 2011; 2013; Websdale, 1998; Women’s Services Network, 2000). While the data is patchy, somewhat inconsistent, and relies on reports of crimes to the police, for Australian states with relatively comparable data, in a nationwide study, Carrington found that the highest rates for violent crimes were consistently located in regional and rural Australia (Carrington, 2007b). The pattern was broadly indicative for the states of Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), South Australia, and Western Australia and to a lesser extent Victoria (see Carrington, 2007b).

As this study was undertaken in the state of NSW, a detailed analysis of rates for domestic violent assaults by region was undertaken over a five year period from 2007 to 2011. This analysis drew upon rankings of recorded crime statistics published by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. These rankings are based on reports of crime to the police, which are then entered into the Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS). This data is ranked as a rate per 100,000 population according to ‘statistical divisions’ as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There are 11 statistical divisions in NSW. Each division or region encompasses a number of sub-statistical’ units which largely correspond to local government areas (LGA). The area of focus for this study was the North and North Western regions of NSW state.

The Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research provides annual rankings of the top 50 LGAs with the highest rate of reported DV incidences per 100,000 population. At the time of this study, in 2011, 46 LGAs in the top 50 LGAs with the highest rate of domestic violent assaults were located in regional and rural NSW (New South Wales Bureau of Crimes Research and Statistics, 2011). Only four high ranking localities for domestic assault were located in Sydney, the metropolitan capital of NSW. Of the 46 LGAs outside Sydney, 10 were in coastal regions and the remaining 36 were in-land regional and rural LGAs. A five year overview undertaken confirmed that this is a consistent pattern (see Owen, 2012). From 2007 to 2011, the LGAs in North and North Western NSW regions consistently recorded higher rates of DV incidents per head of population compared to other regions in NSW. The interviews with rural DV service providers undertaken for this study were drawn from these two statistical divisions or regions.

Higher rates of violent crime in rural and regional areas are often too readily attributed to the disproportionately high number of Indigenous communities located 6

outside metropolitan areas. While localities with high population densities of Aboriginal inhabitants persistently feature in the top 50, and indeed the top 10 ‘hot spots’ for domestic violent assaults, not all of these communities are densely populated by Aboriginal inhabitants. One of the study locations where interviews were conducted, consistently rated in the top ten for rates of domestic violent assaults in the state (Owen, 2012). This particular locality was mainly white agricultural community that was relatively ethnically homogenous – with most inhabitants identifying as of Anglo-Celtic background.

We do not question that Indigenous Australians are over represented as both victims and perpetrators of all forms of violent crime in Australia (Gordon Report, 2002; Lucashenko, 1996; Memmott et al., 2001). In NSW, the state where the field research for this study was conducted, Indigenous Australians are according to official crime data between 2.7 and 5.2 times more likely to be a victim of violence than non-indigenous people (Fitzgerald and Weatherburn, 2002:1). The homicide victimisation rate is several times higher for Indigenous than non-indigenous Australians (Mouzos, 2001: 2). Family violence accounts for 63 per cent of all Indigenous homicides in Australia compared to 33 per cent of non-Indigenous homicides (Mouzos, 2001: 4). However not all Indigenous rural communities are plagued by violence. There is considerable variation across rural communities, both Indigenous and non Indigenous. Rates of violence, particularly for domestic violent assaults, are also high in some predominantly non Indigenous rural localities, such as those selected for analysis in this study. They are also typically high in mining communities in outback Australia (see Carrington, Hogg and McIntosh, 2011). Four of the localities in rural NSW with consistently very high rates of domestic violent assault are mining communities with very small numbers of Indigenous inhabitants. Hence our analysis is cautious about drawing racialised inferences about the concentration or prevalence of DV incidents.

3. Research methods

This article draws on interviews from a study with 49 service providers in New South Wales undertaken for a doctoral research project. The interviews were conducted between 2007-2008i. Rural service providers were selected for interview because they hold the dual subject position of being both community members and professional providers. This dual subjective position is relevant to understanding the operationalisation of an integrated response to DV in rural settings. The study involved interviews with rural service providers from criminal justice agencies (police and courts), health and welfare services across 12 Local Government Areas ranging in population size from 3,000 to 55,000 people. As already mentioned these regions consistently recorded some of the highest rates of domestic violent assault for the State.

Table 1 Service Providers interviewed by Geographical Type ii

Regional Local Large Local Medium Local Government Area Government Area Government Area 20,000 - 100,000 10,000 - <20,000 Pop. 3,000 - <10,000 Pop. Pop. Stoneyburn Kambali Eneabba Anglesey Busselton Kilkenny Windham Goorara Carnamah Bindeli Service Types Legal    Police    Local Court    Women’s Court  0 0 Support Housing- Crisis,    intermediate, long term Welfare support    Family support/    Counselling/ Youth Community  0 0 Development Health   

 Service providers interviewed and location of agency.  Services provided in this location. 0 Services not available at this location.

3.1 Service provider participants

A feature of rural communities is the relatively small population density which creates close social ties between local community members, and even closer ties among human service providers who often share clients (Coorey, 1990: 39, Ermacora, 1998: 39; Hogg and Carrington, 2006: 154; Macklin, 1995; Sumner, 2005: 121; Websdale 1998: 39). It was therefore important this study provide anonymity and confidentiality to individual workers and organisations by using pseudonyms for towns and by using professional titles for individual workers. Anonymity provided the professionals interviewed with confidence to speak about their experiences openly and frankly without fear of identification, stigma or retribution.

Of the 49 service providers, 31 were based in a regional town of more than 20,000 people. Of these, nine also provided outreach or visiting services to outlying large and medium towns on a roster basis or as needed. These services included primary healthcare, health education and training specific to women and Indigenous communities, counselling services, court hearings and limited court assistance by police DV Liaison Officers at various local courts.

Seven service providers from small and medium towns of less than 10,000 people, of this five provided outreach services to outlying rural communities of less than 1,000 people in Indigenous ‘missions’ or isolated farming communities. The number of service providers interviewed was not exhaustive of all services available; the sample reflected the proportional geographical distribution of services and the extent of service reach into rural communities.

The gender distribution of service providers interviewed reflected the feminised nature of ‘caring’ professions and the human services sector more generally (Barclay and Stayner, 2002; Cheers, 1998; Carrington and Hogg, 2006: 160; Cheers, Darracott and Lonne, 2005; McDonagh, 2002: 539; Pini, 2006: 398). Of all the participants, 16 per cent were male and 84 per cent were female. Female participants included a magistrate, managers and frontline workers. Within the criminal justice system, legal aid solicitors and clerical support workers have traditionally attracted women and the participants in this study reflected this trend.

Participants were not asked to state their age; however, from general observations of participants most of the service providers interviewed appeared to be aged between 35 and 50 years old. Approximately six service providers appeared to be over 60 years of age as they spoke of having ‘retired’ but decided to return to work for various financial reasons such as, to supplement a farm income or they were supporting their grandchildren. None of the participants appeared to be younger than 30 years of age. The age distribution of human service providers working in the north and north-west of NSW in this study appeared to be skewed towards the 35 to 50 age cohort.

Due to the relatively small number of publicly listed services in the region, a ‘network’ or ‘snowball’ sample was also used to obtain a greater representation of service providers addressing DV in rural communities. The ‘snowball sampling’ method is useful for recruiting participants who were part of an informal network such as groups based on interests, ethnicity, age or issues (Arber, 2005: 63). This type of sampling was appropriate for identifying participants who were part of an informal professional network that shared interests in DV issues. Rural and regional human service providers in rural towns usually share clients. Their place of work was often in a community setting which linked individual service providers to a network based on locality (town or region) and/ or service sector, such as a regional family support services peak body. 9

3.2 Qualitative interview

Recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and unrecorded interviews with hand written notes were summarised, and where possible, key phrases were captured in quotations. Interview questions were designed around broad themes derived from relevant literature on rural service provision addressing DV. These themes included community attitudes about DV, challenges experienced by rural service provision and the nature of rural service networks. Participant responses were coded according to these themes, in addition to emergent reoccurring themes. Questions posed to each participant varied according to the professions of service providers. This involved focusing questions on specific areas related to the service provider sector. For instance, interviews with various health workers focused on questions about the government agency’s DV screening policy as the main response to addressing the issue. Similarly, interviews with police officers focused on policing procedures for responding to DV reports, the process of working with other agencies and the victim in obtaining a protection order and responses to breaches of orders. Themes were compared and contrasted with existing literature on this topic to check for congruency in findings. While broad findings from this study are similar with studies conducted previously on rural Australia (Hogg and Carrington, 2006; Wendt, 2009) and on rural north America (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2009; Websdale, 1998), the study was more narrowly focused on DV service provision.

4. Findings – Key themes

The interviews with an array of providers involved in DV service provision provided particularly rich insights into the way women’s decisions to seek intervention from government-funded services can be affected by the architecture of rural life. We argue that this peculiar architecture of rural life shapes DV service provision in several distinctive ways. Firstly, personal shame attached to being a victim of DV encourages rural women’s complicity in remaining silent, making it difficult for service providers to access clients. This may lead to under-use of DV services and under- reporting of DV. Secondly, heightened family privacy leaves DV victims isolated and acts to hide DV in rural communities, which again frustrates the objectives of DV service provision. Thirdly, when women break their silence to seek DV service support, the tyranny of distance between major service centres and where they live makes it difficult for services to operate efficiently, or even operate at all. Lastly, the architecture of rural life creates obstacles in the implementation of an integrated service provision, the model of DV provision adopted in urban settings. We expand one each of these key themes below.

4.1 Personal shame and under-use of DV intervention services

The impact of personal shame and embarrassment was a constant theme raised by service providers working with rural women experiencing DV. A social worker from a community health service described the power of social stigma surrounding DV, this way:

“I don’t think people want to be identified, that’s the problem. In small communities, there’s stigma associated with having problems so you get talked about. If you’re in a big place [city] you can go to a service and no-one knows you, but when you front up here everyone knows that you have a problem.” (Community Health Social Worker [1]).

Fear of being the subject of gossip is also an effective deterrent for seeking help. A crisis refuge co-ordinator working in Busselton, a town of 15,000 residents explains just how difficult it is for women in that community to access their service.

“I come from [a small community] and no matter how strapped they are for money, they would never be seen coming to a refuge. Never admit that they are in that situation. They [local women] would come in under some other pretence, because in this society, you don’t admit that you have a problem openly, and that’s a big thing here in rural areas. There’s an echelon [group] here that would never even walk in the gate [of the service], except to donate clothes, to be seen to be doing a donation or something like that.” (Crisis Refuge Co-ordinator).

Informal social controls that act as a deterrent to women to seek assistance to end the abuse, also act to similarly stigmatise DV service providers, making them vulnerable to social stigma, exclusion and professional isolation. Rural service providers noted the different strategies used by groups of rural women to avoid being seen to breach the cloak of silence around their abuse. For instance a family counsellor in Kambali who provided personal support to women in her community describes what she calls a ‘typical’ experience:

“One client who is in domestically [sic] violent relationship - not many people know. Her husband is in a high position in town and he beats her, I mean really bad and she’ll try to hide it. She’ll come into town with a black eye and bruises and tell everyone she had a car accident. Another time she said she slipped in the bath, or she’ll avoid coming into town for a while. She will run out of excuses soon, she can’t keep saying she had a car accident again.” (Family Counsellor).

Photo: Owen, 2006 Figure 2: Domestic Violence is hidden by geographic and social isolation. A house located out of town is some distance from the main road and the nearest neighbour.

Isolation for lengthy periods while injuries heal on remote properties, like the one depicted in Figure 2, is one way of avoiding public shame and humiliation. Internalisation of shame also serves to deny the abuse and displaces DV to other imagined parts of the community, as this primary health nurse described:

“I’ve only heard anecdotes about women living on properties [experiencing domestic violence] as they don’t access our service or no services at all. There’s perception that services exist for ‘those’ people, that you might need a service means moving yourself mentally out of one box and into another box.” (Primary Health Nurse).

The intimacy and density of social-spatial relationships that characterise small rural townships (Weisheit, Falcone and Wells, 1996: 3) whether real or imagined, makes it especially difficult for victims of violence to report it, seek outside help or pursue legal protection through apprehended violence orders. In small towns with high levels of mutual recognition and active local gossip networks, shame and embarrassment can act as major deterrents to reporting violent crimes (Hogg and Carrington, 2006; Macklin, 1995:71). The likelihood that health, medical professionals and police officers will know the alleged offender may also inhibit victims from coming forward to notify the authorities. This alludes to what DeKeseredy calls an old boys’ network that protects perpetrators and stigmatizes victims in rural communities (DeKeseredy, 2011). The architecture of rural life constructs an ideology that those who live rural communities should experience a cohesive and harmonious life, uninterrupted by the corrupting influence of violence and crime of the city. Rural service providers in health, policing, advocacy, housing and counselling in this study described how this myth of the rural ideal operated at a pernicious personal level to deter rural women from seeking their support. This meant that their services, while often stretched as they have to cover large parts of 12 the country (i.e. land masses as large as England), were nevertheless systemically under-utilised. It also meant that domestic violent incidents were systematically under-reported to the police, much more so than in metropolitan areas where there are 24 hour police stations and DV service supports within close proximity.

4.2 Family privacy and the visibility of service use

Service providers interviewed expressed considerable frustration about the obstacles women faced in accessing their services. All 49 rural workers interviewed acknowledged the under-reported and less visible nature of DV in rural communities, and especially white rural communities, as exemplified by this typical response from a social worker:

“Among the white community I think there are very much more insidious things going on behind closed white doors.” (Social Worker).

Obstacles to reporting DV were particularly evident in white communities where generations of families have linkages to local farming areas or town settlement or are highly respected for supporting the cultural development of the town. Service providers were acutely aware that personal troubles were intensely guarded as private family matters, as this counsellor explained:

“I think family business is still seen as something as quite private, should be private and people want it to be private. They don't want it splashed across their front lawn. And would like to facilitate [it to remain] it as a private issue.” (Counsellor).

The emphasis on maintaining privacy about family troubles and sustaining an appearance of harmony at all costs then translates into informal social control that pressures women into hiding instances of DV. Women, like the one referred to in the quote below, are pressured to stay in abusive relationships to protect the family’s reputation.

“She was under huge family pressure and religious pressure from her parents to stay married, not embarrass the family … She had to go to [another regional town] to get a solicitor that would act properly for her because he was from an old family and local solicitors wouldn’t have represented her properly.” (Community Health Social Worker [2])

The above quote highlights the social pressure endured by women who experience abuse to keep DV a private matter. The appearance of a harmonious family front then makes it difficult for rural women to seek help for DV in the face of a rural social order that tends to recognise such acts as breaches of a purified image of rural life. Women’s dependency in this context poses significant barriers to seeking help. 13

Firstly, their perception that they cannot be financially independent without the abusive partner places pressure on victims to remain in abusive relationships. Secondly the pressure to sustain a front of family harmony deters them from seeking the services of DV providers. The victim then becomes isolated and remains in a state of dependency upon her abuser, as other studies have noted (Alston, 1995; Carrington, 2007a; DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2009; Dempsey, 1990; DeKeseredy, 2011; Websdale, 1998; Wendt, 2009), and as this interview highlighted.

“She doesn’t work, he supports the family and they are quite well off. I think she is afraid of what will happen if she leaves him, that she will lose her friends, kids and their lifestyle.” (Early Intervention Family Services Manager).

Rural workers in this study described women’s position in the family as being precarious because they are marginalised in the employment market, locked out of the inheritance structure and have had their education interrupted by family responsibilities. These constraints circumscribe rural women’s perception about their options for dealing with DV in the context of their family and social network. This is not to suggest that the cloak of silence surrounding DV operates exclusively in rural communities, however what is distinctive is the intensity in which the cloak of silence operates to narrow rural women’s options for seeking help of DV service providers.

The starkly gendered nature of the architecture of rural life in Australia means that women’s social networks are facilitated mainly through their husbands’ social relationships in rural and farming communities. The significance of the dominance of male local networks is exemplified by a family counsellor interviewed who ended up marrying a ‘local’ man:

“I socialise with friends of my husband, that’s what you do, but also there’s not many of us [counsellors] out here. On top of that, there is still a lot of stigma around divorce amongst ‘cockies’ [farmers] and town families here. People rarely ask what happened to a couple that got divorced, most of the time they will blame the woman, so friends will side with the husband.” (Family Counsellor).

Clearly no woman wants to be a ‘divorcee’ in small rural settings where gossip and stigma abounds. This is how informal social networks in small rural communities produce effective internalising mechanisms that deter women from seeking assistance, while keeping instances DV that occur within the sanctity of the rural family private. The mere chance of meeting someone you know is enough to deter women from accessing DV services, as a women’s housing manager recounted when interviewed:

“A woman, who lives down the road from me, was in our waiting room when I came into work one morning. She saw me and looked away very quickly, so I pretended not to know her and went to my office. Later found she had left without taking our [housing] application.” (Women’s Housing Manager).

Service providers, like this manager commented that material resources, such as income, children’s education and inheritance are a consideration for many rural women when deciding how to deal with violence and abuse in their relationships. A church based outreach counsellor spoke about having a similar experience, this way:

“This woman [client] that works on the farm, she puts up with abuse because she feels she has nothing to leave for. The husband owns the farm, she works on the farm, looks after the kids, and she doesn’t have any other work experience or qualifications.” (Church-based Outreach Counsellor).

A common misconception is that some rural women remain in abusive relationships just to maintain a certain ‘lifestyle’. This misrepresents the nature of power embedded in relationships of DV. Research on help-seeking behaviours of women experiencing DV have found that they draw upon a combination of personal and public resources, such as social services (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2009; Logan, Shannon and Walker, 2005; Mouzos and Makkai, 2004; Shannon, et al., 2006). Socio-economic considerations in rural women’s decision making cannot be reduced to a superficial concern for ‘lifestyle’.

In this study, rural service providers reported that family troubles were fiercely guarded against challenges that might expose any disharmony. The effect of this serves to silence rural women’s experience of violence and abuse, and deter them from accessing support. The mechanism for silencing operates largely through informal social controls, such as gossip, family honour and shame, which threaten to ostracise rural women who defy these norms to report their victimisation. In small, close-knit communities, the risk of making private troubles visible is both real and imagined. Just visiting a women’s service can expose a family’s reputation to ridicule and community judgement.

4.3 Breaking the silence and facing the tyranny of distance

Photo: Owen, 2006 Figure 3: Leaving violence can involve a long journey to services for rural women. A view of a long drive way into a rural property.

When victims of DV in rural communities overcome their embarrassment and other inhibitions to seek external assistance, many if not most would encounter considerable difficulty in accessing appropriate services, as this and other studies have found (see La Nauze and Rutherford, 1997; Neame and Heenan, 2004). Even where women experiencing violence in their lives access services the problem of violence tends to become displaced as a problem about her homelessness, her mental health or inability to cope with her children and not intimate partner violence or abuse (La Nauze and Rutherford, 1997: 18). Additionally, the prospect of social and economic exclusion is very real for many women who leave an abusive partner regardless of where they live. This prospect is exacerbated for women who need to leave the family home in rural communities, as this example illustrates:

“A client who is from a farming family, left her husband because of abuse, she has lost most of her friends. People didn’t ask why she left, they just sided with her husband. This woman is living on her own but she finds it very hard, she is very lonely because she has no family in town and her adult children live somewhere else.” (Community Health Social Worker [1]).

In seeking intervention via services, women are disclosing to a non-family member both their financial situation and abuse. The breach of this privacy can mean losing friends, as one housing manager stressed, ‘so when divorce comes everybody goes’. Breaking the silence on family privacy can put women in a difficult position with few satisfactory options, as a refuge worker stressed in this response:

“They’re going through domestic violence. All their assets are tied up in the settlement with a very obstructive partner. And they can’t get payments [from 16

Centrelink] and they can’t access to Department of Housing because they have too many assets but they can’t live in their house because it’s not safe or they’re physically barred [by their husband] from doing so. But they get very trapped because they can’t access services because of the income [test] barrier.” (Women’s Refuge Team Leader).

Presently, there is limited research on help-seeking activities of rural Australian women when dealing with domestic and family violence (Wendt, 2009; Wendt and Hornosty, 2010). Findings from overseas studies broadly indicate that strategies for dealing with interpersonal violence tend to be context dependent (Burke, O’Campo and Peak, 2006; DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2008, 2009; Logan et al., 2005; Rennison, Dragiewicz and DeKeseredy, 2013). The threat of losing their social network, material resources for herself and her children are real and imagined. Rural women are then faced with making a calculated risk of reaching out to limited services to deal with the abuse and increase their likelihood of losing personal resources and supports in the process. If they want to leave or end violent relationships, for many in rural areas, this means having to face the tyranny of distance (see Fig. 4) and travel long distances to seek DV services.

Photo: Owen, 2006 Figure 4: View of a highway to the nearest services. For many rural women travelling 100km for a service is the norm.

Rural women who leave abusive relationships face the prospect of only being able to access limited support services. A housing manager describes the dilemma faced by many rural women who do not have the means to even maintain a private car or access housing, when faced with such a crisis:

“If you don’t have a car, how are you going to go round and look at the rental list? Especially if you’ve got a couple of kids. Even if you’ve got people in town who can help you, that’s asking for a favour and there’s a whole economy of favours, so you might not want to pull in all your favours with family and friends, because you might need them later. Someone might give you a lift, but you might save it for another time when you really need it. Or you don’t want to over use your support group.” (Women’s Housing Manager). 17

Photo: Owen, 2006 Figure 5: Navigating the sparse network of domestic violence support services. Looking down a main street where police and court services are located.

Isolation can be both mental and physical, as captured in the above remark. When women in these situations report the abuse to authorities and decide to leave the abusive partner and move out of the family home, they can be left feeling completely isolated with minimal informal support. While these women may be able to access government services for housing, income support and child welfare services this does not replace the centrality of the family unit upon which the architecture of rural life revolves. Although a government funded services may meet the most critical needs of women’s physical safety, it cannot replace supportive informal networks of family and friends.

Relocation can be distressing, particularly when children are involved, and it can also reduce or cease the ability of local service providers to maintain continued support to women across vast distances. As the above quotes illustrate, service providers interviewed made every effort to assist women escaping violence, but with limited available resources and networks. The decision to leave the abuse is the first step to ending the experience of victimisation for rural women, however the chronic shortage of formal intervention and services hampered by vast geographical distance means the pathway to independence and security may be a long or elusive a journey for women experiencing abuse in rural Australia.

In a scenario where there is an absence of available state-based services, women with good access to personal resources, such as friends, family, private counselling and legal services, are more likely to use these to reduce the impact of the abuse or leave the relationship (DeKeseredy and Schwartz, 2009; Shannon et al., 2006). While some rural women appear to have personal wealth through marriage, in actuality many do not have access to their own income, are not supported by friends and family, and are further marginalised by policies that narrowly define (through income testing) eligible victims as low-income women. For women who are in this situation, such as farming women, whose share in the farm property may prevent

access to income support, their victimisation is further exacerbated by social isolation, geographical distance and service exclusion.

In this study rural DV service professionals interviewed stressed that women who break the silence about their own abuse not only challenge dominant norms imagined and inscribed in the rural social order but must also endure the tyranny of distance to seek assistance. For many women, travelling the distance to obtain services is the only pathway to safety. For this reason, geography is a material obstacle as well as a spatial process that facilitates or hinders the effectiveness of DV intervention. The unique problems encountered by women trying to access DV support services in rural areas, provides asegue into a discussion about the entrenched urbancentric biases of such policies.

4.4 Urbancentric models of DV intervention

Under an integrated service provision model, low-income women are identified in policy guidelines as a particularly vulnerable group, and the group most worthy of their support. This criterion might work to differentiate the most needy clientele in cities, but it works to the distinct disadvantage of rural women from farming communities. Service providers interviewed in this study, complained about the application of this criterion in a rural context:

“Just because they have the income doesn’t mean [women] can access it, because it’s tied up, or the house is in joint names. If you can’t live in it, can’t sell or can’t access in it, fat lot of good it’s doing you! All it’s doing is stopping them from accessing services.” (Women’s Housing Manager).

Support and welfare service providers, who often have the first contact with women living in an abusive relationship readily report that women from wealthy family backgrounds do not necessarily have more resources to draw on when they leave an abusive relationship. This lengthy quote from a family support services manager explains the particular predicament of women from wealthy farming families face in weighing up whether or not to report violence or seek help.

“We certainly aren't a community that's escaping domestic violence, it's very present in the community ... especially in the outer pockets [of town], we see a lot of financial abuse in that people are out on properties because they're quite wealthy while they stay in the relationship … because of that it's difficult to get the woman some assistance sometimes because she might technically own [assets] … with those families is that quite often the parents in-laws might really hold the wealth under their names, it's hard to ascertain income as they [women] might just get an allowance … their children are attending private schools, but if the relationship breaks down it’s hard for the woman to leave with any assets or income.” (Family Support Services Manager [1]). 19

The complexity of inheritance and financial arrangements in some farming families, like those described above, where women relinquish paid work for an allowance to run the family budget can create additional barriers to leaving an abusive relationship and to being eligible for support. A housing manager interviewed explained how their service attempted to overcome this obstacle.

“While the majority of our clients are low income, but this is not always case. Sometimes we house women who are on the higher income bracket and have a higher level of education … they can also have high needs because of the loss of social group that happens with marriage breakdown. What happens in marriage is friends of wives are friends of the husband, so when divorce comes everybody goes.” (Housing Manager [1]).

Other DV service providers interviewed also provided examples of how they used their ingenuity to find ways to ensure all women who come to their service received support, regardless of the financial capital of their families or abusers. This was particularly evident in the comments made by women-centred services.

“We ask for some basic information when we first meet women but we don’t ask about their income—as far as we’re concerned that doesn’t matter.” (Court Support Worker).

“… we don’t ask or record our clients income. Some are well-to-do families in town so they wouldn’t fit into our criteria but we are the only service around. So that’s how we get around it.” (Family Caseworker).

In this study, rural service providers interviewed revealed an awareness of the complexities facing rural women experiencing DV, who were unable to access personal resources or access formal public services as a result of not meeting the income test criteria. Women-focused services, such as family support services, court support, women’s centre, housing and refuges were flexible when using the income test, set by their funding agencies to assist women in such circumstances, as the above quotes indicate. Service provider perspectives on the socio-economic backgrounds of women who require assistance for DV was based on localised knowledge of women in the community. Although the socio-economic profile of women service users was not within the scope of this study, we recognised that poverty in regional and rural communities are distinct from urban experiences. For instances, in Australia, regional and rural communities generally have lower household incomes; reduced access to services (education, health and transport); declining employment opportunities and experience greater distance and isolation (Australian Council Of Social Services, 2012; National Rural Health Alliance and Australian Council Of Social Services, 2013; Vinson, 2007).

DV policy formation and administration in the state of New South Wales is highly centralised in urban areas. The needs-based funding models for DV services, which elevate income criteria as a basis for prioritising support, fails to address the peculiar situation of cash poor, but capital rich farming women. Cheers (1998: 94) argues that most Australian social policy frameworks are urban-centric because rural social justice issues are mainstreamed. The mainstream policy approach, at best views rural needs as the same as those of urban populations to be dealt with through the same policies, programs and services. At worst, social policy at the state and federal levels overlooks the specific needs of rural communities and rural women experiencing DV (Alston, 2010; Hogg and Carrington 2006). In particular, approaches to DV have generally assumed that rural women have access to wide- ranging and specialist services and referral points such as General Practitioners, 24 hour polices stations, housing, public and private transport and employment opportunities within close proximity. If only.

The lack of criminal justice personnel dedicated to DV to assist women to access legal protection and sanction men’s use of violence in rural communities, means there is not enough law enforcement officers available to attend crisis situations. Single officer police stations, of which there are many in rural and remote Australia, are not ‘manned’ to respond to calls for assistance that may be a great many kilometres away. Limited programs to support women to leave violent situations, such as employment opportunities, affordable and accessible public transport, housing, social support, childcare make it challenging for rural workers to implement a co-ordinated response. Fragmented and thin service provision also poses a barrier to providing consistent, co-ordinated and integrated services. Hence a centralised urban approach to DV policy, which assumes the existence of all these services within close proximity, is structurally biased towards urban dwellers.

5. Concluding Remarks

Based on interviews with DV service providers drawn from two regions of NSW experiencing high rates for domestic violent assault, this article argued that the peculiar architecture of rural life shapes DV service provision in several distinctive ways. Firstly, personal shame attached to being a victim of DV encourages rural women to remain silent about their abuse making it difficult for service providers to access clients. This may lead to under-use of DV services and systemic under- reporting of DV to police. Secondly, heightened family privacy accentuated by the architecture of rural life leaves DV victims isolated, which further frustrated the objectives of DV service providers. Thirdly, when women did break their silence to seek DV service support, the tyranny of distance between major service centres and where they lived hampered the effectiveness of DV services. Lastly, the architecture of rural life created obstacles in the implementation of integrated service provision, the model of DV provision adopted in urban settings.

The particular effectiveness of urbancentric policy instruments in rural communities needs to be critically re-examined, as this model only makes it more difficult for women living in rural Australia to access adequate DV services. Analysis of rural service provider interviews examined the process by which workers recognised the intent of service intervention and the challenges women face in seeking assistance. The constraints of poor infrastructure, limited services and local attitudes about family privacy that protect the status quo create barriers to effective intervention and access to services in rural settings. Implications for DV policy development should ensure rural perspectives are incorporated into various stages of the policy cycle. For instance, at the policy scoping stage, research literature about rural communities could inform the definition of DV as a community issue as well as the identifying policy response options. The emergence of ‘place-based’ projects in Australia is an example of an alternative policy approach that holds promise of delivering geo- spatially relevant social policy (Ferrie 2008). The trend towards place-based social policy is a positive one for rural communities, although it is beyond the scope of this study. Suffice to add that this approach values local knowledge and emphasises the architecture of rural life shaping service access.

The geo-social dimension of rural DV discussed in this article illustrates the distinctive challenges endured by DV service provision in Australian rural communities. The architecture of rural life framework was used to investigate the experiences of professionals working in providing DV services and to shed light on the limitations of an urbancentric policy approach in rural settings. That architecture draws sharper boundaries around private and community life against outside social interventions perceived to threaten idealised images of rurality. This architecture relies on self- enforced moral codes of silence when instances of violence occur within the sanctity of the rural family. These heightened mechanisms of informal social control make the conditions of rural life less receptive to forms of DV service provision that over the last century have worked in regulating family and DV within urban settings (see Hogg and Carrington, 2006). Although not a focus of this study, the gendered space in rural families (see Dubisch 1986; Hirschon 1984; Ortner and Whitehead 1981) need further investigation to better understand service use from the perspective of rural women.

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i Santi Owen undertook all the primary research upon which this article is based for her Phd, School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology. ii Pseudonyms of Local Government Areas.