This story by the NPR affiliate in Pittsburgh discusses the particular challenges facing rural victims of domestic violence: lack of anonymity, lack of services, and spatial isolation that removes them from sources of assistance--both law enforcement or their neighbors. The reporter, Larkin Page-Jacobs, focuses on micropolitan Indiana County, Pennsylvania, population 89,298, a bit east of Allegheny County and Pittsburgh. Page-Jacobs uses the narrative of a domestic violence victim, "C," to illustrate these challenges.
On average, a victim tries to leave her partner seven times. But it is when a victim attempts to separate from a batterer that she is most at risk. It was during one those attempts that C was ambushed by her estranged husband. She was in hiding, living in an apartment she had found with the help of a shelter. It took her husband a single day of walking the roads, one by one, to spot her car and where she was staying. With a gun in his waistband and his hand clamped around her wrist, he drove her to their home in a borough of a few hundred residents in Clearfield County.* * *C said she knew law enforcement might not be able to stop him [from following through on his threats]. Response time can be excruciatingly slow in rural communities: State police are tasked with patrolling more than half of the state’s nearly 2,565 hundred municipalities – most of them in rural areas. With so many miles to cover, it can take emergency services 30 to 45 minutes to reach the scene of a crime.
“There was no houses around us, and the houses that were in a three mile range were either his family members, or his family members’ friends,” she recalled.
* * *
“The night the assault occurred, that’s why he took me there. There’s no one. If you take off running you’ve got farm fields.”
Horrible situation and also aggravating that once again, it is a serious issue that lacks serious funding.
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