Research on gender-based violence (GBV) across place has consistently demonstrated rural/urban differences in violence prevalence and risk as well as context-specific barriers to accessing services and community-level resources for prevention and intervention. Although the definition of rurality is central to this line of inquiry, how it should be operationalised continues to be debated among scholars. In criminological studies, ‘place’ is often defined in terms of discrete categories: rural, suburban or urban. Discrete definitions of place obscure intragroup differences which may account for a variety of characteristics that likely contribute to GBV perpetration and effective prevention and intervention. Further, the commonly used rural/urban categorisations, based on thresholds of population density, population size and level of commuting, often result in labelling areas as urban that might qualitatively be considered rural. For example, most areas with the highest yields of agriculture products in the United States are considered to be in metropolitan statistical areas (that is, they are proximal to large cities and in areas with high commuting rates, and therefore in counties that are not considered rural) even though most would consider farmland to be inherently rural places. This chapter will contribute to theoretical framings of rural GBV by presenting different operationalisations of rurality in the United States and critically addressing the use of discrete and continuous measures of rurality in GBV research.