This study seeks to investigate instances of family violence against women in rural East Central Saskatchewan, Canada and to assess need for services and support. The researchers claim that violence in this region is suffered in significant numbers and draw attention to the fact that rural living isolates women from support services such as social services and counseling. The article attributes many women staying in abusive situations for years to lack of access to these services, embarrassment and limited knowledge about what constitutes abuse. Intergenerational abuse was identified as a driver of a cycle of abuse; abusers came from households in which their mothers were abused and therefore accept abusive relationships …show more content…
The interviews brought up feelings and experiences for the women that are difficult to deal with. The researchers addressed this issue by ensuring that women were able to access mental health services immediately should any of their participants require it, noting that a number of the women re-entered counselling as a result of participating in the research. Furthermore, a mental health therapist with “extensive counselling experience with women who have been abused” conducted the interviews. These precautions offset the risk of mental and emotional harm to the participants. For women who have suffered abuse from their spouses, there is also the threat that speaking out will cause violent retaliation from their partners. In order to minimize this risk, all of the women interviewed were separated from their partners or in the process of leaving.
Research merit: it is essential in research such as this that the benefits of the research to the community and academia outweigh any risks to the research participants. The researchers express a desire for their research to provide the foundations of a “new paradigm of service delivery to be developed for rural areas.” The research gives a series of recommendations based on the information gathered indicating that the merits of this research outweigh the emotional …show more content…
The aim of the research was to help to develop a discourse of services for rural women suffering from family violence and by consulting women who have required such services, the researchers succeed in generating a set of recommendation to aid the creation of “an action plan” for rural communities. However, the study has some limitations. The researchers fail to assess how prevalent family violence is in rural Saskatchewan population. Because of this, someone developing a set of services to deal with family violence wouldn’t have a grasp of how many people they could expect to be