Victims and Criminal Justice A History

Victims and Criminal Justice is the first study of its kind to examine both the origins and impacts of key legal, procedural, and institutional changes introduced in England and Wales to encourage and govern prosecution. It sets out how crime victims' experiences of, and engagement with, the process of criminal justice changed dramatically between the late seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. Where victims once drove the English criminal justice system, bringing prosecutions as complainants and prosecutors, giving evidence as witnesses, putting up personal rewards for the recovery of lost goods or claim rewards for securing convictions, by the end of this period, victims had been firmly displaced as the state took virtually full responsibility for the process of prosecution.

Combining qualitative analysis of a range of textual sources with quantitative analysis of large datasets featuring over 200,000 criminal prosecutions, the authors explore how victims were defined in law, what the law allowed and encouraged them to do, who they were in social and economic terms, how they participated in the criminal justice system, why many were unwilling or unable to engage in that system, and why some campaigned for specific rights. In exploring the shift in victim participation in criminal trials, Victims and Criminal Justice places current policy debates in a much-needed critical historical context.

Pamela Cox, Professor of Sociology and Social History, University of Essex,Robert Shoemaker, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sheffield,Heather Shore, Professor of History, Manchester Metropolitan University

Pamela Cox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Her teaching, research and writing spans social history, crime history and interdisciplinary social science. She led the interdisciplinary ESRC project on Victims' Access to Justice that inspired this book. She is a member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Criminology and has served as chair of the editorial board of Cultural and Social History.

Robert Shoemaker has been Professor of History at the University of Sheffield since 1991. He has published widely on the history of crime and justice, gender, and London in the 'long' eighteenth century. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of seven books, was a founding director of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and co-director of other major historical web resources including Connected Histories, Locating London's Past, London Lives, and the Digital Panopticon. With Tim Hitchcock, he was awarded the 2011 History Today/Longman Trustees Award for contributions to history through digital projects 'that point the way to the future of the discipline'.

Heather Shore is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and previously worked at Leeds Beckett University, University of Portsmouth, and University of Northampton. She has published widely in the field of crime and penal history. She is the author of two monographs, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (1999) and London's Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 - c. 1930: A Social and Cultural History (2015); and the co-author of Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses from 1850 (2017). She has led and collaborated on awards from the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

1. Introduction
2. Hidden Victims
3. From Prosecutors to Victims
4. Public Prosecution
5. Victims at the Old Bailey: Prosecutions
6. Trials and Outcomes
7. Post-war Victims and the Pains of Prosecution
8. Epilogue
Appendix: Datasets