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Chapter contents. Why is research on the history of victims important?
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CHAPTER CONTENTS
· Introduction 180
· Why Is Research on the History of Victims Important? 180
· What Methods Are Appropriate for a Study of the History of Victims? 181
· The Research Journey 183
· Change over Time 184
· Gender 186
· The Disappearance of the Victim in Court 188
· The Victim–Offender Overlap 189
· Future Research Directions 190
· Summary and Review 193
· Study Questions and Activities for Students 194
· Suggestions for Further Reading 194
· References 195
GLOSSARY TERMS
complainant Old Bailey coining
victim-offender overlap tagging
digital corpus linguistic methods prosopography
USING HISTORICAL ARTEFACTS, RECORDS AND RESOURCES IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Pam Cox, Heather Shore and Barry Godfrey
INTRODUCTION
In the past, victims had to drive prosecution processes themselves in order to access any kind of justice. They were central to the criminal justice system, particularly prior to the nineteenth century. However, there has been little research conducted on historical victims of crime. Most crime historians have focused on offenders, on the cultures of control employed to contain or reform them, and on public responses to particular kinds of crime committed by them. There is a large gap in our knowl- edge of those people who have pursued justice on their own behalf over the course of the last 300 years. As leading crime historian George Rudé put it (1985: 76): ‘What do we know about the characters or attitudes of victims? The answer is very little. ’ More than half a century on, that is still the case. To that we could add the question ‘Will knowing more about the history of victims tell us more about the criminal justice system as a whole and how well that system works? ’ In this chapter, then, we describe the importance of researching this topic. We then describe the research journey – giving examples of what has been done so far, including the meth- ods used and results obtained, before going on to describe research that we would like to conduct in the future – research using new historical methods and sources to explore key questions about the history of victims of crime.
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WHY IS RESEARCH ON THE HISTORY OF VICTIMS IMPORTANT?
Research on the victims of crime is important for three main reasons.
1. They are a central component of the criminal justice system. For a large range of offences, unless there is a victim there is no crime. They appear as witnesses (although much less than they ever did, as the number of trials per head of popu- lation has decreased markedly over time), and they are uppermost in the minds of magistrates and judges at the point of sentence (even if they didn’t appear in the courtroom).
2. The ability of victims to have equal access to the courts is a central tenet of a democratic state. Securing fair and effective access to justice for victims of crime is a priority for many states around the world. It concerns citizens’ ability, through the prior claiming or granting of rights, to seek formal acknowledgement and redress of wrongs committed against them within a given legal system (see Conklin, 2001; Cooper, 2009; Law Society, 1992; Mayo et al., 2014; Palmer et al., 2015; Sandefur, 2009).
3. Measuring the experience of victims allows us to measure the efficiency of the wider criminal justice system. For example, various initiatives have been put in
place in recent years to close ‘justice gaps’, where some groups or individuals in society have not had equal access to fair trials, or redress as victims of crime. These initiatives have included, amongst other things, the introduction of better legal protection and awareness of rights; available and affordable counsel through the increasing provision of legal aid (Brooke, 2016; Maguire, 1928; Morgan, 1994); procedural rules for trials and delivery of justice; and an unbiased judiciary.
Since the 1980s, victims have been placed firmly on the criminological and public policy map (Goodey, 2004; Gottfredson, 1984; Kirchengast, 2006; Newburn, 1993). However, we still know surprisingly little about past victims of crime. How has access to justice for victims changed? Who has sought access to justice and with what out- comes? How have victims’ rights and needs been defined and met over time? What has been the result of changed levels of help for victims to gain justice? What has been the impact on prosecution patterns and outcomes of the introduction (and reform or with- drawal) of specific rights, resources and services for victims involved in criminal trials? Which groups have had the most effective access to justice in what circumstances and how has that changed over time? Historians of the eighteenth century in the 1970s and 1980s believed that the criminal justice system was a tool for the rich to use against the poor (Hay, 1975; Linebaugh, 1991). Within that system, the rich prosecutor was assumed to hold the power of life or death over unrepresented ill-informed and uneducated labourers and tenants. However, more recent research, based on a study of the complainants in criminal trials, has proved that the power to prosecute was not solely within the purview of the powerful. Social inferiors used the law to call their ‘betters’ to account in public (Beattie, 1986: 8–10, 193–6; Hay, 1989: 354–60; King,
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1984: 29–34, 2000: 35–9, 2004: 144–6). We do not know whether the law continued to be so widely used by all classes in the nineteenth century. We do know, however, that victims of crime in the eighteenth century appeared to be predominantly male. Was this true, or was it that certain groups in society – women, migrants, children – were pre- vented from reporting their victimization? When this changed – if it did – was this because of changing levels of aid for victims of crime or because of wider social changes? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did victims have increased access to justice through legal representation, and, if they did, were they able to secure better results in court? How have people begun to investigate these questions?
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