ABSTRACT
In Australia in recent decades, violence against women has been referred to as ‘a national crisis’ (Piper and Stevenson, 2019). As a result, advocacy, policy, and practice have focused on ensuring safety and the wider prevention of violence. Whilst this has been invaluable, broad-brush approaches have led to the obscuring of some women’s experiences. This chapter addresses one underexplored area. It considers the impact of the intersection of age, gender, and geographic location on family violence experienced by young women aged between 10 and 20 years of age, their access to justice, and service provision in rural and remote Australia. Existing evidence from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) (2019) demonstrates that women who reside in regional, rural, and remote communities are known to experience higher rates in the frequency, and in the severity of family violence and intimate partner violence, compared with their urban counterparts. In tandem, young women as a social group continue to remain absent from the dominant family violence discourses in both rural and urban contexts (Johnston et al., 2022: 11), yet they are more at risk from all forms of violence and harm compared to older women (Women’s Services Network (WESNET), 2000). Contextually, the social construction of Australian rurality is considered both gendered and Anglocentric (Murray et al., 2019: 93). Such gendered and racial discourses both create and reinforce ideological and cultural ‘myths’ of Australian rurality (Owen and Carrington, 2015: 230). These centre white masculinity and exacerbate the risks to women – notably First Nations and Women of Colour – as well as the challenges for women in accessing justice and support. The specific experiences of young women of adolescent intimate partner violence and the intersections with rurality have been largely unexplored in an Australian context (Hooker et al., 2019). Further, internationally, women generally remain marginalised, invisible, and voiceless in the criminological literature on rurality, violence, and access to justice (Magnus and Donohue, 2022). Adopting intersectional, social constructionist, and feminist lenses, this chapter commences by exploring literature on rural identities and violence. It challenges the absence of young women’s voices in the dominant narratives of rural identity and family violence discourses, as well as in the associated body of existing criminological literature. The chapter then explores the ‘justice-seeking’ and ‘justice-receiving’ processes of young women who experience family violence in rural, regional, and remote areas of Australia, noting implications for Australian criminological inquiry into such violence and justice responses to young women.
