What methods are appropriate for a study of the history of victims?

Information about victims of crime can be found quite easily in local archives and records offices throughout the UK. The local court registers for most petty sessions’ courts (magistrates’ courts) give the name of the ‘ complainant ’ alongside that of the

defendant, the offence and the sentence imposed. It is a relatively straightforward matter to create a data set (using Excel or SPSS) that records the victims and some information which is usually obvious (for example, the name of the complainant normally reveals the gender, but not always), as well as sometimes providing addi- tional information – ‘wife of accused’, or ‘child of 12’, and so on. Transcribing a sufficiently large number of months of prosecutions in one town’s petty sessions’ courts will provide enough data to cross-tabulate gender of victim by offence, for example. This is meaningful data, which can reveal interesting results – how many women were victims of indecent assault compared to men, for example? How many children were victims of crime in any one place? Unfortunately, however, we usually want to know about change when we think about victims, and crime generally. That means collecting data over several years, and if we want to compare one town against another, then it means collecting details of tens of thousands, maybe hun- dreds of thousands, of prosecutions which can be entered into a single data set. For example, the database of 50, 000 prosecutions taking place in the reasonably small town of Crewe in north-west England in the late nineteenth century, analysed by Godfrey, Cox and Farrall for their study Criminal Lives (2007), took nine months to construct.

TaBle 8. 1 Defendant and victim data

An alternative to transcribing huge amounts of data is to focus on a smaller sample of cases involving a smaller number of victims. Past issues of local newspapers, which are usually kept on microfilm in local libraries, can provide detailed histories of

individual cases of victimization. A trial can involve a number of weeks of reportage, and a detailed case study can easily be constructed, although, again, a small number of specific cases may not illustrate a general trend in the way that a large-scale quan- titative study can:

A policeman described a clearly very agitated woman as ‘capering about like a mad dog’ (Crewe Chronicle, 14 May 1881). The court had a titter at the language of a woman in a street brawl. She said that she and her ‘daughter had had a little drink. They were slightly elevated (Laughter). ’ In fact five of the thirteen jokes surround drink and mark the ambiguous boundary between cultures of sociability and the drunkenness that framed so much violence. (Godfrey et al., 2009: 262)

The means of securing both a significant number of cases for a database, with a diversity of victims, and also a sufficiently deep and rich amount of data for the study of just a few cases of victimization, has recently been transformed. The digital deliv- ery of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century court records and newspapers has now allowed researchers to quickly locate and transcribe criminal cases without needing to travel to archives. Crime historians have helped to pioneer Big Data digital humanities research. The Old Bailey proceedings was a pioneering project which allowed the interrogation of large numbers of court cases at the Central Criminal Court between 1674 and 1913. A more recent project, the AHRC-funded Digital Panopticon, is creating a substantial new resource which allows users of a freely avail- able website to piece together the lives of people sentenced to either imprisonment or transportation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So, what have we learned about victims and criminal justice using traditional and digital methods and sources?