Research has shown that spiritual and religious identification plays a role in defining women's experiences of violence and therefore that social workers need to acknowledge and create safe spaces to talk about this identification. This article describes a rural Australian study that focused on the impact of a local culture on domestic violence, in which Christianity strongly influenced women's experiences of violence. It is argued that looking at women's experiences of domestic violence through a feminist poststructuralist lens is valuable because it provides a framework for exploring and sensitively challenging oppressive discourses that inform women's identities.
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