By Liz Carey
While intimate-partner violence is a problem in all areas of the country, victims in rural communities need more resources and support, a new study has found.
The study from the University of Minnesota’ Rural Health Research Center found that rural victims of intimate-partner violence, or IPV, face more barriers and resource limitations that could affect their health and well-being. Attempts to address intimate-partner violence in rural areas should be tailored to the specific needs of the people and places in those areas, the study said.
Alyssa Fritz, the lead researcher on the study, said her team spoke with 15 state and national advocacy organizations, some serving rural communities directly, to determine what barriers rural victims face and what opportunities exist to address those challenges.
“The advocates that we talked to said, across the board, increasing funding that is accessible to smaller and rural organizations is needed,” she said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “And I think funding training, specifically in detecting and responding to IPV, training for health care providers, and law enforcement and judges, is important.”
All of the respondents said rural victims lack access to services like shelters, advocacy, legal services and law enforcement. Most frequently, the organizations said there was a shortage of support services and shelters in rural communities, and if programs that address intimate-partner violence exist, they are underfunded and understaffed.
Another issue facing rural victims, Fritz said, was a lack of access to health care. Many respondents also said poor health care access, especially for victims who are pregnant and postpartum, was a challenge in IPV intervention. Many times, the respondents said, if victims were able to access health care, there was a lack of IPV-specific and trauma-informed knowledge or training amongst the professionals who interacted with IPV victims in rural areas.
“We did find that pregnant victims of IPV were less likely to be screened (for IPV),” Fritz said. “Anecdotally, we’ve also heard that to be the case (for non-pregnant victims). It’s possibly driven by the fact that there might be less training for rural health care providers… They’re covering lots of different conditions and they might not see things like IPV as often, and don’t have training in it.”
And rural residents tend not to report IPV, the researchers found, because of the lack of anonymity. Nearly half of the organizations brought up a lack of privacy and confidentiality in small communities as an extra challenge that rural victims have to consider when they weigh whether or not to reach out for help or leave. In other cases, attitudes and societal norms in some rural communities may justify or normalize violence and victim-blaming.
“So you [a rural victim] may be much more enmeshed in your community, you may know the lawyer, the judge, the police officer, the abusive partner’s job, family, associations and things like that,” one national advocacy organization was quoted as responding in the study.
In a different study focused on IPV survivors in Vermont, Anna Mullany, a postdoctoral student at Emory University, found that even organizations that were supposed to help victims sometimes did harm. Prior to her doctoral studies she worked as a crisis counselor for many years. Many of the IPV survivors she talked to said those attitudes were sometimes more damaging than the violence, creating further barriers for victims in getting help.
“I ended up doing 32 interviews with survivors of violence in rural Vermont and a number of them would tell me instances of violence happening out in the community,” Mullany said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Not just something that was gossip or that people knew about, but that they actually witnessed… There’s a stigma and judgment they experience that is so detrimental. I actually had one survivor tell me that the judgment she felt after she left the relationship… almost did more damage than the actual abuse.”
Mullany said that, in many cases, victims could not rely on law enforcement to help, either. In remote areas, law enforcement may take 15 or more minutes to respond. And if the officers know the accused, they may choose not to arrest them.
“One of my interviewees was in an extremely abusive situation and she had called the police on him a number of times,” Mullany said. “One of the times they showed up, they did not arrest him even though there had been a violent incident present. As soon as the police left, she was thrown up against a wall. So, sometimes, if the police are not skilled in that situation or don’t see the level of danger, it can actually cause more harm to the victim because a perpetrator will retaliate.”
Other studies have shown that IPV is more prevalent in rural communities. A 2011 study supported by the University of Iowa Social Research Center and the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center found that women in small rural and isolated areas are more likely to experience IPV than women in urban areas, and generally are three times as far away from IPV resources than urban women. Over 25% of women in rural areas lived more than 40 miles from the closest program compared to less than 1% of urban women.
Respondents to the University of Minnesota research said IPV doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but instead happens because of the societal structure that exists and will be difficult to undo.
“People that hold power, you know, are perceived to have more rights to behave the way they want to, and how do you hold power accountable when you’re not in power?” one state advocacy coalition told researchers.
But combatting all those challenges, Fritz said, means more funding for entities outside of the advocacy organizations as well, she said.
“The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that all pregnant people be screened throughout their pregnancy and postpartum (for IPV),” she said. “But research shows that it does not happen nearly as often as it should. So, a response to that could be looking at reimbursement mechanisms to make sure that providers are incentivized to screen.”
Respondents to the study said IPV prevention initiatives, direct and discretionary financial support for victims, and policy making in rural communities that includes IPV victims and survivors are also needed.
“Imagine just a very low barrier, means-tested access to income supports, instead of the kind of hostile system that we have, where folks are having to get denied and then reapply; you know, SSI (Supplemental Security Income), those kinds of things, to be able to have their basic needs met. Absolutely fundamental, particularly for folks in rural areas,” one national advocacy organization told researchers.
But respondents said it was just as imperative to invest in rural community infrastructure to ensure that IPV victims have the resources they need to leave their abusers and to heal in safety. From rural housing access to affordable child care to investment in broadband internet and transportation infrastructure, providing rural IPV victims with resources, services and information was a key factor in helping ensure their safety and health, the study, Intimate-partner Violence in Rural Communities: Perspectives from Key Informant Interviews, published in March 2024 found.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License
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