The study found significant differences between rural and urban rates of nonservice of protective orders. Findings support the view that rural areas have structural barriers to the full legal implementation of protective orders. Economic disadvantage is a primary factor, in that there are too few resources to support an efficient system of serving protective orders. There is more modest evidence supporting the explanation that the homogeneity of the rural population facilitates a reliance on informal case processing, which further undermines a technical and efficient system of service through formal channels. Since the issuing and enforcement of protective orders is a significant factor in domestic-violence cases, particularly in preventing contact that leads to violence, the processing of such civil orders is a critical factor in the context that facilitates or undermines an effective response to domestic violence. The units of analyses for the study were all of Kentucky’s 120 counties; counties are the official “unit of jurisdiction” regarding orders of civil protection. Data analyzed were combined from a variety of sources, including the Kentucky State Police; the U.S. Census Bureau; the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The dependent variable was county-level rate of protective orders issued but not served in 2003. The key exogenous explanatory variable for the analysis was rurality, as measured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture rural-urban classification codes. Resource deprivation was measured by the county-level index of socioeconomic deprivation. Measures of informal social control relied on structural characteristics assumed to predict weak informal social control in the urban sociology and communities-and-crime literatures. 2 tables, 7 notes, and 66 references