Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America

Foreword

vii Foreword Dangerous Exits speaks to the plight of rural women (and women everywhere) in abusive relationships. Walter DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz vividly describe the ways in which rural culture and rural society (and culture and society everywhere) can enable these forms of violence to both emerge and persist. Further, this work passionately advocates for ways that rural communities (and all places, everywhere) can and should respond to a social problem covered up by layers of traditional and anachronistic assumptions about the roles of women and men in society, by the skewed and biased responses (and often, no response) of some rural law enforcement and social agencies serving rural populations, and by norms of tolerance (and even silence) among neighbors, kin, clergy, and local leaders for behaviors that should produce moral outrage. Dangerous Exits is so multidimensional in its approach that it simultaneously informs the literature in rural criminology,critical criminology, feminist criminology, feminist studies in general, police studies, the sociology of the community,social action and community development,rural sociology, violence against women, and the treatment and rehabilitation of crime victims. However, it is not simply the number of diverse ways that the reader can approach this book that makes it a significant contribution to the literature. It is the incredible number of lessons contained within the stories of forty-three rural women, combined with the scholarship of DeKeseredy and Schwartz. The authors point out that violence against women is a form of terrorism invisible to most of the public, hidden behind a silent wall of women too intimidated and fearful to act, communities in denial about problems that exist in their own backyards,and criminal justice and social service agencies who seem to have other priorities. Weaving quotations from the forty-three rural women they interviewed with literature from criminology, feminist studies, and rural sociology, DeKeseredy and Schwartz demonstrate why a critical perspective should be a primary approach to the study of rural crime in the years ahead.While many scholars of rural sociology have taken an approach to research and theorizing that reflects the observation of C.W. Mills that personal troubles must be understood within the context of public issues, most rural sociologists do not consciously embrace a critical perspective. This is probably because most rural sociologists feel compelled to approach their work seeking a multilevel sociological understanding of rural issues, which recognizes that what happens at specific rural and remote places, and to the people who live there, cannot be understood without reference to social structures, social change, and relationships of dependency with the larger world, especially when economic, political, and cultural power resides mostly at urban centers. DeKeseredy and Schwartz see things that many other scholars do not. For example, they inform readers, rural communities are as diverse as cities and suburbs,and simplistic rural-urban dichotomies are not very good ways to approach the study of rural crime in general, and of separation and divorce sexual assault specifically. Perhaps of greater importance, by linking social structure and culture as expressed in the rural context,the authors pose a tough,scholarly challenge to mainstream criminological theory and related research,especially that associated with social disorganization theory and its revision around the concept of collective efficacy.The authors also challenge rural sociologists who have uncritically grabbed hold of the concept of social capital as if it always functions for the good of rural people.As DeKeseredy and Schwartz illustrate, crime in all its dimensions varies according to what kinds of social organization, forms of collective efficacy, and expressions of social capital are in play. For example, as many of the women in this book attest from experience, men in the rural context described here support and encourage their peers to abuse women.To show how some rural men learn, act out, and obtain approval for their abusing and violent behavior by peers, the authors describe relationships and primary group networks that fall within what many criminologists and rural sociologists refer to as gemeinschaft. Foreword viii Dangerous Exits never lets us forget that nonintervention and minimal assistance on the part of family, friends, neighbors, and law enforcement represent the norm in many local, rural social structures.And, the authors show, these enablers of violence against rural women exist alongside the very features of rural places that constrain violence, abusive actions, and for that matter, all forms of crime. Along with the mistaken idea...