Talking back : rural Ohio women's reflections on violent intimate relationships

Abstract

An increasing number of scholars have expanded rural crime research since the 1990s, but the majority of their empirical and theoretical investigations have been mainly gender-blind. To add, research on the topic of the decision-making processes of rural women experiencing intimate partner violence, especially women who stay in abusive relationships for any length of time, is lacking in the field. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap through an examination of how women navigate their intimate violent relationships within the context of their social, cultural and historical realities. A secondary data analysis of qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with 43 rural Ohio women revealed the imperative to focus on women's contextualized decision-making processes, specifically the decisions to stay, with a consideration of the social, economic, and criminal-legal obstacles they confront in the process. The supplementary data revealed by qualitative in-depth back-talk interviews with 12 rural Ohio women uncovered their individual and shared constructions of the meanings given to the violence they experienced and their stay-leave negotiations in the course of their abusive relationships. Naming and defining their abusive experiences allowed for the construction of themselves and others and their conceptualizations and definitions of abuse and victimization factored tremendously into their stay-leave decision-making processes. The characteristics of abusive male partners and rural community attributes also factored into women's stay-leave negotiations and still remain an important feature of rural life that changed little through place or time. Viewing women in context shows how work, age, motherhood, love and sexual jealousy exist as integral components of their individual and social locations that impacted their decisions as actors to resist domination and achieve a sense of agency. All women demonstrated that even when they stayed, they were actively making decisions and plans and employing a variety of survival strategies that demonstrated resilience and resistance. This dissertation contributes to the rural crime literature by showing how the social, cultural and historical context in which resistance takes place and how the construction and production of men's identities and masculinities as they are negotiated in the face of socially and economically altered rural landscapes is of vital importance.