Victimization narratives and courtroom sexual politics: Prosecuting male Burglars and female pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860-1921

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Burglary and pickpocketing were the two most prevalent forms of male and female offending, respectively, in the flourishing colonial capital of Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article compares the prosecution patterns and public perceptions of male burglars and female pickpockets. Both offences were associated in the Anglophone world with membership of the criminal classes and in the colonial context with concerns about a remnant convict populace. Moreover, both male burglary and female pickpocketing occurred in intimate contexts that threatened the possibility of sexual violence or uncontrolled female sexuality. Yet although both crimes were the subjects of community concerns, the conviction rates for burglary and pickpocketing differed dramatically. This article examines the ways in which the gendered contexts of burglary and pickpocketing-in relation to constructions of victims as much as defendants-exacerbated the usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women, as well as other factors that served to place men at far greater risk of conviction. It is suggested that a close reading of the victimization narratives of these two offences complicates traditional perspectives on the policing of male and female sexualities in the criminal justice system

‘Us Girls Won’t Put One Another Away’: relations among Melbourne’s prostitute pickpockets, 1860–1920

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Larceny from the person, or pickpocketing, was the most common form of indictable crime committed by female offenders in turn-of-the-century Melbourne. It was an offence particularly likely to appear within the criminal careers of recidivist female offenders. Female pickpocketing, however, was notoriously difficult to prosecute. The usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women were exacerbated by the specific contexts in which such robberies occurred, that is in the context of solicitation or sex work. This not only meant victims were reluctant to prosecute, but that women’s offending often took place within criminal subcultures that fostered interpersonal relationships between women that served to support them throughout the commission of the crime and during the trial process

Versatile offending: Criminal careers of female prisoners in Australia, 1860-1920

The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women’s offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges conceptions of women as predominantly petty offenders by suggesting that some women were arrested for minor offenses because of their engagement in more serious crimes and their participation in criminal sub-cultures

Risk factors and pathways to imprisonment among incarcerated women in Victoria, 1860–1920

© 2018 International Australian Studies Association. Criminological studies have found that men’s and women’s pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and pathways to imprisonment of 6,042 women incarcerated in Victoria between 1860 and 1920, and the risk factors associated with subsequent recidivism. The findings suggest that, while many of today’s risk factors were present historically, there have been notable shifts across time

"Woman's special enemy": Female enmity in criminal discourse during the long nineteenth century

The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the "criminal classes" from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other's worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational contexts; in particular, I explore how such narratives were received from the European and Anglo-American worlds and perpetuated in the Australian colonies during this period. It is shown that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commentators portrayed criminality as a moral contagion communicated by women-often deliberately and maliciously- to each other. The crimes most often associated with females were also depicted as being based upon the exploitation of women by other women. Descriptions of the female criminal persona emphasized their incapacity for friendship or suggested they were capable only of perverted interactions that tended towards mutual destruction. Moving across time and transnational contexts, various permutations of criminal discourses thus promoted an image in the popular imagination of female relationships as sites of danger and latent animosity, and moreover suggested that this reflected an underlying dynamic among women as a whole

“I'll have no man”: female families in Melbourne's criminal subcultures, 1860–1920

In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships with men have historically been more important than their relationships with one another. This article suggests that men were often fleeting figures in the families of criminal women. Male absence encouraged women from criminal subcultures, instead, to draw together to form female-centred households. Such living arrangements were further facilitated by the general instability in the home lives of criminal women caused by financial uncertainty, periodic incarceration and crackdowns by authorities, as well as by separations from their natal families and a high degree of personal mobility. These issues are explored through archival material from late nineteenth- and early twentieth century Melbourne, and through the writings of prison poet Janet Dibben

A Menace and an Evil": Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900-1918

Fortune-telling was hugely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Frequently employed as entertainers at society and charity events, fortunetellers across the country plied their trade from shops, street-stalls, private homes or travelling sideshows, and advertised their businesses in the daily press. Yet fortune-telling was also a criminal practice under legislation inherited from England. Up until the early twentieth century, however, it seems to have been seldom policed. In contrast, the dawn of the new century saw spates of prosecutions against practitioners and decisions by a number of Australian states to affirm the practice’s criminal status under new laws. Divining the future was treated as ‘a menace and an evil’, and as an embarrassment in the face of the scientific and intellectual advances of the era. At a time when Australia was entranced by a vision of itself as a rational, forward-thinking nation of white males, fortune-telling was not only considered a relic of old-fashioned ignorance but was associated with female credulity, working-class superstitions and incursions by foreign cultures. The history of fortune-telling therefore offers new ways of understanding how questions of gender, race and class inflected the national identity developed during the Federation era. This article has been peer-reviewed

Band edge evolution of transparent Zn M2III O4 (MIII=Co, Rh, Ir) spinels

ZnMIII 2 O4 (MIII = Co, Rh, Ir) spinels have been recently identified as promising p-type semiconductors for transparent electronics. However, discrepancies exist in the literature regarding their fundamental optoelectronic properties. In this paper, the electronic structures of these spinels are directly investigated using soft/hard x-ray photoelectron and x-ray absorption spectroscopies in conjunction with density functional theory calculations. In contrast to previous results, ZnCo2O4 is found to have a small electronic band gap with forbidden optical transitions between the true band edges, allowing for both bipolar doping and high optical transparency. Furthermore, increased d-d splitting combined with a concomitant lowering of Zn s/p conduction states is found to result in a ZnCo2O4 (ZCO) < ZnRh2O4 (ZRO) ≈ ZnIr2O4 (ZIO) band gap trend, finally resolving long-standing discrepancies in the literature