Dangerous Exits: Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America

Preface

xi Preface Since the 1970s, social scientists have greatly enhanced an empirical and theoretical understanding of various types of woman abuse in ongoing heterosexual relationships,such as dating,cohabitation,and marriage.Still, although we know that breaking up with a patriarchal and/or abusive man is one of the most dangerous events in a woman's life, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the victimization of women who want to leave, are in the process of leaving, or who have left their marital or cohabiting partners. Further, the limited work done on this topic focuses primarily on homicide and nonlethal variants of male physical violence. Woman abuse, of course, is multidimensional in nature and a few U.S. studies show that many women are also at high risk of being sexually assaulted during and after separation or divorce. Nevertheless, almost all the research on this problem, regardless of whether it is qualitative or quantitative, was done in urban areas, such as Boston and San Francisco. The main objective of this book, then, is to help fill a major research gap by presenting the results of a qualitative study of separation and divorce sexual assault in three rural Ohio communities. Guided by previous relevant research and an integrated theory constructed byWalter S. DeKeseredy,McKenzie Rogness,and Martin D.Schwartz,this project was funded by National Institute of Justice Grant 2002-WG-BX-0004 and involved interviewing forty-three rural Ohio women who experienced considerable pain and suffering as the result of separation and divorce sexual assault and other forms of abuse. The data gathered from these women are, to the best of our knowledge, the very first of their kind and seriously challenge the commonly held notion of rural communities as immune from high levels of woman abuse. One of the key risk factors identified in our study and given much attention in this book is male peer support, which is defined by Walter DeKeseredy as “attachments to male peers and the resources they provide which encourage and legitimate woman abuse.” Except for Neil Websdale 's Kentucky study described in his 1998 book Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System:An Ethnography,no prior empirical attempt has been made to understand the nature and content of pro-abuse male social networks in rural U.S. communities. Most male peer support research, including our own, has been quantitative in nature and limited to explaining woman abuse on college campuses. Moreover, no other study has concentrated on whether male peer support contributes to sexual assault either during or after the termination of an intimate relationship. In addition to focusing on how male peer support is strongly associated with separation and divorce sexual assault,Dangerous Exits addresses the influence of other major determinants of such assault,such as pornography , men's adherence to the ideology of familial patriarchy, men's patterns of alcohol and drug consumption, and the absence of effective informal and formal measures of social control.The consequences of the abuse our respondents experienced are also described, as well as their policy recommendations.We offer our own progressive policy proposals in chapter 6. Preface xii ...