Thinking critically about biographical methods within criminology

Returning to our starting points in this chapter, and the work of Clifford Shaw and The Jack Roller, there are methodological questions that even this most revered and fundamental study raise for the more general use of biography as a method within criminology. One such question includes: what relationship existed between Shaw (the researcher) and Stanley (the ‘subject’)? We learn about this from Gelsthorpe (2007), who argues that biographical methods have the ability to transgress the iterative interaction between subjective experiences and objective social circum- stances (as was facilitated by Thomas and Znaniecki (1918) in The Polish Peasant). By focusing on the relationship between the researcher and the ‘subject’, a variety of methodological questions are brought to the fore – for example, questions about:

· the extent of Shaw’s influence on the authenticity of Stanley’s account of his own experiences (i. e. it was perhaps too logically structured)

· the overall paternal influence Shaw may have had across Stanley’s life course beyond the research project of The Jack Roller

· the origins of the rich descriptive insights of delinquency and social disorganiza- tion in Chicago within Shaw’s other work (i. e. the Chicago Area Project)

· the nomothetic influences of the Chicago School of Sociology at the time of writ- ing and the holding back of any account of the psychological influence that either (researcher or ‘subject’) had on the other (Gelsthorpe, 2007).

By drawing on historical documentary data (such as the Digital Panopticon, as we have above), some of these methodological issues are circumnavigated; problems inherent to symbolic interactionist studies, such as The Jack Roller, are unlikely to be encoun- tered when using historical data. In other words, the arrangement of biographies via historical documentary analysis by criminological historians paints its own picture by allowing the documentary evidence to ‘speak for itself ’ (as it were). Nevertheless, if we take both Stanley and Scannell’s lives as exemplars of criminological biography, we can raise a unifying conceptual problem that underpins the theoretical and methodological practices at work in the use of criminological biography both past and present.

Where is William? The presence and absence of the ‘victim’

To help explore this critical line of inquiry, another methodological question we want to pose is: ‘Where is William’? At this point, you might be better first asking yourself, ‘who’ rather than ‘where’ he is. If you didn’t quite catch this, it is not particularly surprising. We suggest a great many ‘Williams’ have been missed in studies of crime and deviance. In answer to the question of who William is: from Box 16. 4 above, William Westwood is Peter Scannell’s (purported) victim of theft. Therefore, in answer to the question of where William is: despite his cen- trality to the history being reconstructed, his own experiences and life story are nowhere to be found in this biographical account. Having made this observation, we urge you to think about what issues this raises for criminological research and biographical methods.

If the uses of biography within sociology and criminology have been subject to certain ‘turns’ or ‘rises’ over the decades, within victimology (i. e. the empirical and theoretical study of ‘victims’) its uses have been almost non-existent (see McGarry, 2016 for an extended discussion). The reasons for this are akin to those noted earlier in this chapter with regard to criminology. In brief, ‘conventional victimology’ (qua Walklate, 1989) – similar to that of the ‘criminological enter- prise’ (qua Jupp, 1989) – has historically been dominated by a disposition for the scientific measurement of criminal victimization, with a particular emphasis on victimization that takes place in public (i. e. on the ‘street’) rather than in private (i. e. at home). Positivist victimology (see Miers, 1989) juxtaposes the ‘criminal’ and the ‘victim’ in a linear relationship with one another and assumes a ‘principle of differentiation’, whereby to be a non-victim equates to being ‘normal’, render- ing those who experience criminal victimization as ‘abnormal’ (Walklate, 2006). Preferred ways of documenting and analysing such ‘abnormality’ then come through the use of large-scale surveys which reduce the complex experiences of criminal victimization to statistical data sets from which patterns and comparisons can indeed be made, but the depth and nuance of the lived experience of vic- timization is disconnected. Challenges to the reductionism of such experiences were made by writers in the critical victimology tradition (see Mawby and Walklate, 1994). As Francis (2017) outlines, a critical victimological perspective draws on theoretical aspects of socialist feminism and left realism, and mobilizes victim survey data differently by asking critical questions of structure, agency, gender and vulnerability, for example, in relation to victimization – the purpose of which is to unpack the social and cultural contexts of how victimization is experienced, and identify how the abstraction of such experiences is used for politically divisive purposes and policy formation. One way of developing this critical strand of victimological inquiry is through the use of autobiography (see Stanley, 1992, 1993). The entry point into using autobiography as proposed within the context of this discussion derives from the advancement of what is coming to be established as cultural victimology, ‘a victimology attuned to

human agency, symbolic display, and shared emotion’ (Mythen, 2007: 464). This has been variously developed in relation to the theoretical and policy impli- cations of representation as derived from visual artefacts (i. e. images) via ‘visual victimology’ (see Walklate et al., 2014), the centring of autobiographical reflec- tion, personal testimony, and the role of the ‘victimologist as witness’ (see McGarry and Walklate, 2015).

To explore this popularized appetite for autobiographical reflection, we encourage you to browse the shelves of bookshops and supermarkets and pay attention to the number of books there that are written by those who have experienced trauma, harm or victimization. Then, once you have found one that takes your interest, make an attempt at the following activity (see Box 16. 5), the purpose of which is to use writ- ten autobiography as textual data in order to encourage you to think critically about an experience of ‘victimization’ far removed from the confines of criminological biography. An analysis from the view of a ‘victim’ will provide quite a different con- ceptual insight into the depiction of crime, harm and violence.

A biographical ‘malestream view’

In observing the (alleged) victimization of ‘William’ in Box 16. 4, we also come face to face with a fundamental problem of criminology and victimology that urgently needs to be at the forefront of our imaginations when thinking about the ‘victim’.

As reflected in the relationship between Scannell and William, young men are fre- quently the most likely not only to perpetrate violent crime, but – as Walklate (2007) reminds us, and as found consistently in past and present data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales – it is also young men between the ages of 17 and 25 who are more likely to experience ‘violent crime’ as constituted by ‘street’ crime. This normative way of considering crime and victimization alone is what is understood as a ‘malestream’ view of the social (read victimizing) world (Walklate, 2004: 14).

In recognizing this as a fundamental issue of how the ‘problem of crime’ and criminal victimization are constructed within the political, policy and popular imagination, we encourage you to think about what further issues this now raises for victimological research. We suggest that criminological students and research- ers should be sensitive towards, and willing to consistently challenge, such normatively depicted and commonly held assumptions relating to the experience of victimization; that which are simply assumed to be perpetrated by ‘men’ against other ‘men’, and disproportionately experienced by ‘men’ in public. To be clear, this is not to diminish nor subjugate such experiences of harm, but to instead put ‘gender on the agenda’ within biographical and autobiographical research (qua Davies, 2011). If we take, for example, the Crime Survey of England and Wales, we learn from Walby et al. (2014) that what this tells us about the experience of victimization from violent crime is not only misleading, but also understates the extent of gender-based violence against women. For Walby et al. (2014), the cap placed on the reporting of violent offences, and the definitional separation of sexual offences from ‘violent crimes’, has rendered the issue of domestic and sexual violence against women dramatically underreported in official statistics. By challenging legal and methodological definitions of vio- lent crime as gender-based violence, our normative assumptions relating to young men (i. e. ‘William’) being the most likely victims of violent crime are quickly reimagined. Instead, we would find that women disproportionately experience all violent crime (including interpersonal and sexual violence) by a considerable margin (Walby et al., 2014). This observation may well become more obvious when browsing for an autobiography relating to trauma, harm and victimization, as we have suggested. You will most likely find that a considerable proportion of them are written by women, relating to experiences of violent (often sexual) victimization perpetrated by men, frequently in the private domain. Therefore, a key value of the biographical and autobiographical use of textual artefacts of ‘victims’ should help facilitate a shift in our attention from the public domain of male interpersonal violence (as overrepresented in democratic recording prac- tices such as the Crime Survey of England and Wales) to the private and often unseen domain of gender-based violence against women. We suggest that such a conceptual approach is a useful starting point, rather than apex, of thinking critically with regard to biographical and autobiographical methods within crimi- nological and victimological research.