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Summary and review
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This chapter has explored how the history of victims has been studied – how researchers ‘did’ that; and by following the research journey through some key find- ings, the chapter has finished by suggesting how we can now ‘do’ more research. The local court registers that provided the source material for some of the research on victims in the early 2000s have benefited historians considerably. By transcribing cases recorded in original documents and held in local archives and libraries, we have now revealed changes in the number, and gender, over time. We have seen the extent of the victim–offender overlap, and we have seen how the police takeover of pros- ecutions has affected recorded crime levels (for violence especially). However, the limitations are clear. This kind of work is time-consuming, the geographical range is limited and only a limited number of years can be collected. Digital resources, such as the Old Bailey Online, have speeded up research, but the information they reveal about victims is minimal.
As more digital resources become available, it will be possible to carry out larger ‘Big Data’ research on victims. If the data on victims from court-generated records can be tied together with contemporary newspaper reports, as well as personal and biographical records (in the way that the Digital Panopticon does for offenders), then it would be possible to produce very wide but detailed histories of victims in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That kind of research would then allow researchers to answer, with confidence, the question posed by pioneering crime his- torian George Rudé nearly 50 years ago: ‘What do we know about victims? ’
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