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The victim–offender overlap. Future research Directions
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THE VICTIM–OFFENDER OVERLAP
The idea that ‘victims are conceptualized as individuals who have no experience of crime as offenders’ (as first critiqued by Newburn and Stanko, 1994: 153) has been overturned by recent research on modern victimization (see, for example, Fagan et al., 1987; Lauritsen et al., 1991; Singer, 1981). Many offenders have experienced victimization, and many victims have committed offences. The Crewe data has also been used to investigate the extent of the historical victim–offender overlap. An almost complete 60-year run of petty sessions data revealed many examples of a given person sometimes appearing in court as a victim and at other times as an offender. Godfrey and colleagues (2007) compared 300 persistent offenders and a roughly equal number of one-off offenders who appeared before Crewe magistrates between 1880 and 1940.
Persistent offenders were found to be more likely than one-off offenders to have experienced victimization. For some, this was because they were often involved in fights, where they sometimes prosecuted those who hit them, and at other times were prosecuted by those they had hit. The local newspaper was keen to report these regu- lar incidents: ‘it was one of those family rows which sometime happened in Crewe streets, and especially Lockitt Street, which seemed to be a famous resort for pugilists’ (Crewe Chronicle, 3 December 1892). Walter Green who, during a 15-year period,
was charged with seven assaults, also charged seven others with eight counts of assaulting him. For others, it was family problems at the root of their offending and victimization, and Godfrey et al. (2007: 159–60) gave the example of Adam Toshack:
Adam was born in Crewe in 1866 and married Aurelia Paisley in 1885. Their mar- riage was not a happy one, and in 1886 she took him to court for aggravated assault, for which he was found guilty and fined 30s. (at that time he was earning 26s. a week at the railway works as a painter). In 1889, Adam took his wife and a local bricklayer (Graeme Rowley, another of our persistent offenders) to court for theft following Aurelia’s elopement with Graeme Rowley. Aurelia accused Graeme Rowley of compel- ling her to pawn the things, saying that he had threatened to act ‘Jack the Ripper’ on her, but the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. In the same year Aurelia in turn took Adam to court for assault (also dismissed). An already rocky relationship went from bad to worse in 1890, when Adam took his father in law, James Paisley, and brother in law Casper Low to court for attempted murder. Casper Low (born 1866) was married to Adam’s wife’s sister (Molly). Casper Low was committed to trial and found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, part of which he served in Knutsford Prison. Adam and Aurelia’s marriage stumbled on despite these setbacks until 1896 when Aurelia died. Adam followed her in 1914.
In keeping with contemporary analyses (Farrall and Calverley, 2006), Godfrey et al. (2007) found that episodes of victimization outlasted offending – even when a person stopped committing crimes, they were still likely to be victims of crime. Some of this was the result of the ageing process, making offenders more likely to cease offending and simultaneously more vulnerable to assault. The explanations are not easy to uncover. Further research on the victim–offender overlap is necessary.
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Indeed, despite all of the interesting data which these projects have produced, there are still a number of questions that remain. How did the outcomes for female and male victims of crimes change over time? Were some people multiply victimized? Has there always been a victim–offender overlap? How did the introduction of formal police services change the number and type of victims? We know that victims disappeared from magistrates’ courts (like Crewe) because minor assaults were downplayed by the police who refused to take them to court, but was that why more serious offences were not prosecuted in the higher courts (like the Old Bailey)? How would our research findings change if we had access to a bigger sample, to some historical ‘Big Data’?
FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
As indicated, the kinds of questions that can be answered about the history of victims are dependent on the historical sources that we have had to hand. In the past, crime historians spent numerous months of their lives with pencil in hand transcribing
court registers and other court-generated data. There was a considerable step for- ward in using data with the creation of the Old Bailey Online. As we have seen, this has given us some limited search abilities in order to track the gender (and, to a much smaller extent, the age) of victims of crime since 1674. Now we are entering the age of ‘Big Data’, and, in this penultimate section, we would like to imagine some differ- ent projects which use Big Data to advance our historical knowledge of victims in new and interesting ways.
If we had access to all of the digitized data contained in the Old Bailey Online, for example, what could we do? When the Old Bailey records were digitized, some of the information was ‘tagged’ so that it could be separated and counted. The gender of victims was ‘ tagged ’, for example. However, their occupations, addresses and the nature of any ‘legal support’ offered or taken up were not, and nor was any previous experience of victimization or offending.
Let us imagine for a moment that we had this kind of data available to us: what kinds of research questions could we now ask? Maybe, with questions of class and social stratification in mind, we would ask: how did the demographic characteristics and socio-economic profile of victims change over time? What correlations were there between the social status of the complainant, their type(s) of victimization (or offending) and the outcome of their trial? Thinking about place and spatiality, we might want to know: Where did victims live? Where were people victimized, in what kinds of places – the streets, their homes – and did this alter if they were male or female? How close did offenders live to their victims? Were they living in the same street, or house? Were they neighbours, family members, workmates or (former) friends? We would examine connections between ‘where people lived, where they spent time and with whom they associated’ (Gottfredson, 1984: 17), and whether ‘entrapment in averse neighbourhoods’ was a major determinant of victim–offender overlap (Farrall and Calverley, 2006). With process in mind, we could ask: How did the growing professionalization of criminal justice actors (Langbein, 2003), such as solicitors and sentencers (stipendiary and district judges, for example), change out- comes for victims? What contribution was made by the growing use of medical experts, and forensic evidence? Lastly, how did the formal recording in court records of victim/complainants’ details change over time and how might this relate to shifting public perceptions of victims?
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How would a future ‘imagined’ project like this go about answering these ques-
tions? To start with, we would want the project to chart the broad infrastructural factors shaping public access to justice in criminal trials across the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using historical and legal research methods, we would track the introduction (as well as reform and withdrawal) of rights, resources and services upon which victims could draw prior to, during and after a prosecution. We would also want to track shifts in, for example, the statutory rights of victims to defend themselves, to hire (subsidised) legal representation, to bring charges, to make witness statements and to conduct cross-examination. Relevant resources and services here include: the rise of prosecution associations and prosecution lawyers
(1730s); the police (1830s); the creation of a new public prosecution mechanism (1870s); the Poor Man’s Lawyers movement (1880s); the expansion of private insur- ance schemes (1890s); the removal of victims from court processes (1920s); legal aid (1940s); criminal injuries compensation schemes (1960s); victim support groups (1970s); Crown Prosecution Service and victim surveys (1980s); and victim personal impact statements (2010s).
The project would therefore need to analyse the socio-economic profiles of, resources available to and outcomes for victims of a wide range of crimes prosecuted over the last three centuries in one of the nation’s most important courts. The project would assemble a new evidence base to establish who they were, what relationship (if any) they had with offender(s), how they came to be complainants, prosecutors or witnesses, how they made use (if at all) of available resources, how they were viewed by others, and, crucially, in what ways their cases were ‘resolved’ and their citizen- ship rights asserted. In this way, this future project would provide a new and much-needed historical angle on established debates around repeat victimization and the ‘victim–offender overlap’.
This is quite a project we have dreamt up. What kind of research design and meth- odology would be required to achieve its aims?
First, we could take all of the existing digitized records of 202, 791 Old Bailey trials from 1674 to 1913 (using the existing resource, Old Bailey Online). Because, so far, only certain data has been ‘tagged up’, we would ‘tag’ all available data appearing in these records about individual victims and thereby establish a large data set containing, for each victim, their age, gender, ethnicity (where possible), place of residence, occupation, place of work, the nature of the alleged crime(s) against them, relationship (if any) to the accused, the nature of the prosecution process and the outcome of that process. Through multivariate quantitative analysis, we would be able to reveal broad patterns of primary, secondary and repeat victimization from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Although necessarily constrained by archival selection and survival (like all historical research), this kind of analysis would allow us to explore historical parallels (or divergences) with the findings of key contempo- rary studies.
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Second, we could create a database of a number of victims of crime and combine the information we have collected for them (gender, age, and so on) with other digitized data. We would search for the individual victims of crime in the digitized census records (1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911) and thereby record details about their place of birth, place of residence, neighbourhood, occupa- tion and (in some cases) their relationship to the accused. In order to capture biographical data that is not contained in the criminal justice records or the other available digitized civil records, we will also utilize the online digital newspaper reports. These may help us to ‘fill in the gaps’ about our victims. They might also help us to carry out some other forms of analysis on victims. Using digital corpus linguistic methods, we will assemble and analyse the descriptive terms used in news- papers from the 1700s to the present (via online archives of The Times,
The Guardian and other digitized online newspapers available from Gale Cengage and ProQuest – most university libraries have a subscription to these holdings). Emergent patterns across the whole data set could then be analysed, visualized, mapped and disseminated.
The newspapers offer yet more opportunities. We could use them to analyse the changing descriptions of victims of crime. The textual constructions of victims could tell us a lot about the way victims were perceived (if not by society as a whole, at least by the press? ). We could simply count the number of times crimes against women, or children, or a particular occupational group, were reported in the press, compared to the actual number dealt with at the Old Bailey – were there any media biases that we can detect?
This project is imaginary, so can we push our imagination still further.
Taking a prosopographical approach, we could study the lives of victims. We already have the digital material to reveal the lives of victims, just as Godfrey et al. (2007) did for offenders. We could then investigate whether some people were repeat victims, and if they were, speculate why. We could see whether victimization affected future life – did victims of violent sexual assault in their youth go on to form relationships? Did shopkeepers who were regularly victims of theft change their occupation? Did victims of robbery in one area move to another part of town, or a different town? That might take some work, a lot of time, and we still might not have all of the data we would need, so this might not be feasible. Indeed, our imagination is still, it seems, limited by the sources we know exist, even if we cannot process them, and analyse them as we would wish. It is possible that historians of the future discover sources, or find new ways of using them, which we do not yet know. Then, further data will produce (and answer) new questions about victims.
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