Analysing Criminalisation in Rural Community Contexts

This chapter focuses on family violence, and discusses the ways in which welfare interventions are critical to reducing criminalisation and the pathways leading to prisons. It reviews different sites of family violence in rural settings in an effort to understand how the governmentality literature can assist in analysing the forms of power at stake in these relations and how these power relations can be changed. Community participation needs to be able to reframe the assumptions that structure rural cultures in ways that enable the context of family violence to be acknowledged, named and transcended. Expanding a shared knowledge of the subjective and experiential aspects of violence is an important means of confronting violence in rural settings. Sharing this knowledge and its underlying assumptions provides opportunities for citizens in rural environments to participate in processes that undermine the antecedents of violent behaviours.