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The research journey. Change over time
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THE RESEARCH JOURNEY
Historians of crime and victimization use cutting-edge methods to analyse avail- able sources of data, but those methods change over time, and so does access to available sources as the following sections will show. Research on victims, and on offenders for that matter, has been shaped by the type of historical sources that have been available to researchers. There is a research journey which takes us from basic research (counting the numbers of different types of victims over time in contemporary court registers) through to some quite detailed analysis of the interactions of gender and victimization (using newspapers and other, more qualitative sources), back to counting victims again (but with a quantum leap in scale this time around because of the availability of ‘Big Data’). Let us start by describing some of the interesting issues that have been uncovered during the research ‘journey’.
Change over time
Digital crime history projects have helped to transform crime history research and that of its parent disciplines, social and economic history (Hitchcock and Shoemaker, 2007). One of the most important of these is the Old Bailey Online (OBO) project that has made it possible to search the lives of the thousands of people involved in 202, 000 trials at London’s central criminal court over three and a half centuries. Using the online statistical tool embedded in the project’s website, it is possible to obtain some ‘headline’ figures, such as the recorded number of complainants (who may be the victim of the crime, or someone who prosecutes on their behalf). For example, it is possible to see the rise in the recording of complainants involved in these cases up to the mid-nineteenth century, followed by a sharp fall and thereafter stabilising at between 500 and 1000 victims per year until the First World War (see Figure 8. 1). This cliff-edge fall is intriguing, but this data tells us very little about why the fall took place, or how victims were affected by it.
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FIgure 8. 1 Number of complainants recorded at the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (figures taken from Old Bailey Online)
What more do we know about these victims apart from their names? Old Bailey trial records in this period did not routinely record the ages of offenders or victims: the ages of only 662 of these victims are recorded – a tiny fraction of the total num- ber. However, we know more about their gender and we can also break this down by offence (see Table 8. 2).
Men were clearly the complainants in most cases, and appear most often to be the victims of certain kinds of offences prosecuted in the Old Bailey, such as pickpocketing, robbery and fraud. This may be because men held more wealth and were therefore greater targets for acquisitive crime. The percentage of female complainants was higher in cases of coining (although the reasons for this are not clear) and in cases of indecent
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TaBle 8. 2 Offence and gender of complainant, Old Bailey, 1674–1913
| Male complainant | Female complainant | Total | % male | % female | |
| Pickpocketing | |||||
| Robbery | |||||
| Fraud | |||||
| Assault | |||||
| Coining | |||||
| Indecent assault |
assault, where young women and girls were more often the victims of men rather than the other way around. However, this kind of bald prosecution data tells us very little about the victims themselves. Things start to get a little more interesting when we look at the gender of victims across the whole of the period covered by the Old Bailey Online. Figure 8. 2 shows us that not only did female complainants make up a small fraction of the total number, but also the percentage was steady between the late eight- eenth and early twentieth centuries. This is despite the significant fall in the number of complainants from the 1850s. Changes in prosecution practice caused a dramatic fall in the numbers of male, rather than female, complainants, as can be seen in Figure 8. 2.
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FIgure 8. 2 Victims, by gender, at the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (figures taken from Old Bailey Online)
Even this limited data highlights some interesting – and as yet unanswered questions – around the gender of victims in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
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