Mid Sweden University

INTRODUCTION

Violence against girls and women is a global problem, not only for the victim herself, but also for society in general (Garcia-Moreno, 2002). In the case of women with children, violence is also a problem for these children. A multi-country study on violence against women in 15 sites and 10 different countries, mainly low-income, shows that there are wide variations in prevalence between and among settings (World Health Organization, 2005). The differences were not only between countries but also between rural and urban areas within a country, with overall levels of violence against women consistently higher in rural than in urban settings. This means that we need to take space and place into account in studies of violence against girls and women. To date, the links between place and sexual violence against girls and women is an understudied area. Indeed, as Sandberg (2013) notes, the study of intimate partner violence and other forms of sexual violence in rural settings, in particular, may in fact be a blind spot in intersectional research.She calls fora consideration of how place may intersect with such constructs as class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. To this list we would add age, with the idea that addressing violence against girls and young women is a particularly critical concern in relation to ensuring safety and security for a new generation. The urban condition and life in the city as studied in relation to migration, housing, social supports, and violence itself (including sexual violence) is typically taken up in research that ranges from a focus on townships and informal settlements in the Global South through to thestudy of urban sites in the Global North. However, while the trend for people to live in urban spaces is increasing, this does not mean that there are no social issues that need to be addressed in rural settings; in the context of declining resources and state provisioning, rural life presents its own challenges. There is also a discursive construction of the rural areas that is characterized by higher rates of sick leave, higher unemployment, and the migration of young people away from the area. Added to this is the perception that rurality does not contribute to the economic development of the country (Nyhlén, 2013, Eriksson, 2008). This way of describing the rural can be regarded as an act of othering in that it positions rurality as the other in relation to the urban/center. In this way center and periphery are somehow interdependently constructed. Urbanization itself is built on the premise that resources are taken from the periphery and used in the center (Andersson, Ek & Molina 2008).We stress the importance of asking questions about what it means to study rurality and about how we can create research that goes beyond images of a declining rurality, not forgetting in this process, to ask questions about how rurality is gendered. The purpose, then, of this chapter is to address the necessity of understanding violence against young girls and women by theorizing the relationships between and among place, gender, and violence, particularly in relation to rurality. We do this by first contextualizing our arguments, focusing on three country contexts—Canada, South Africa, and Sweden. We then address three particularly important areas: (1) place-based gender and ethnic regimes, (2) rural vulnerabilities, and (3) local policy enactment.