Remote-control: Regional, rural, and remote women’s experiences of digital coercive control

Research on technology-facilitated violence has typically focused on urban locations. This is problematic, as both experiences of and responses to harm are shaped by features of the social and geographic environment. In this chapter, we advocate for greater consideration of spatiality, contending that both place (fixed geographic locations) and space (what happens in a place, essentially; influenced by acts, actors, ideologies, structures, and values that occupy a place) warrant attention in studies of spaceless violence. Drawing on the first study, internationally, to consider non-urban accounts, we examine women’s accounts of what we term ‘digital coercive control’ in regional, rural, and remote Australia. We believe that both digital coercive control and rurality restrict women’s ‘space for action’: their choices, agency, and action. In the interests of advancing an evidence base and responses to this issue, we propose conceptual frameworks and make recommendations for future studies.