Tracking the Gendered Life Courses of Care Leavers in 19th century Britain

The adult outcomes of children raised in care are a matter of much concern in Britain today. Care leavers account for a quarter of the adult prison population, a tenth of the young homeless population, and over two thirds of sex workers (Centre for Social Justice, 2015: 4). This article argues that, by contrast, the first generation of boys and girls passing through the early care system were more likely to have experienced a modest improvement in their life chances. It explores three key questions. First, what mechanisms shaped adult outcomes of care in the past? Second, did these vary by gender? Third, what might life course approaches to these issues gain from engaging both with historical- and gender-inflected analysis? The article draws on our wider analysis of the life courses and life chances of 400 adults who passed through the early youth justice and care systems as children in the northwest of England from the 1860s to the 1920s. These systems were closely interlinked. Within that, the article focuses on the experiences of a subgroup sent to a more care-oriented institution. It compares their collective outcomes with those of the wider group and within-group by gender. It offers a selection of case studies of women’s lives before and after care to highlight the value of, and challenges involved in, undertaking gender analysis in life course research of this kind

Gender and the commission of violent street robbery in Liverpool, 1850–1870. A historic criminology approach

Instrumental studies of gender and the accomplishment of violent robbery in the United States (Miller, 1998) United Kingdom (Brookman, Mullins, Bennett, & Wright, 2007) demonstrated that whilst men's and women's motivations for committing street robbery were similar – to fund addiction, hedonism or to supplement meagre incomes – male and female robbers commissioned the offences in markedly different ways. By offering a historical counterpart to modern criminological enquiries, this article examines gender and the enactment of street robbery in Liverpool between 1850 and 1870. By drawing on a database of 260 cases, I argue, in line with the patterns of offending by men and women uncovered in contemporary UK and US criminological studies, that men and women committed street robberies in ways that were shaped by the gender-stratified nature of street life and structured by broader gender and class inequalities. In doing so, the article reflects on how historical criminological approaches can develop our understandings of gender and violent crime across time and place and hopes to encourage future interdisciplinary work in historical criminology, gender and violent crime

History, life- course criminology and digital methods: new directions for conceptualising juvenile justice in Europe

The digitisation of historical record sets is increasingly enabling researchers to compile and compare offending trajectories and life- course histories.The relatively recent digitisation of genealogical sources including the census, birth, marriage and death records, crime registers and newspapers means that crime historians are able to ‘unlock’ the biographies of young offenders and chart significant life-course events, processes and transitions including admission to, experience in and release from penal institutions, alongside their subsequent education, employment, housing, geographical (re)location, (re)marriage, parenthood, military conscription, re- offending, desistance and, ultimately, death. Using a combination of biographical and multivariate analysis, such research can draw upon ‘cradle to grave’ data to examine how juvenile justice interventions that took place over the course of the nineteenth century – including placements in Reformatory and Industrial Schools, imprisonment and transportation – was experienced by juvenile offenders and their families and the effects that such experiences imposed. This chapter aims to encourage historians and criminologists to synthesise historical and contemporary datasets to examine juvenile justice and punishment across both time and space. Gathering life histories from across Europe can provide a lens through which to examine the effects of historical, cultural, social, economic and political change upon juvenile offenders. Life- course criminology has already demonstrated the value of embedding biographies within their temporal and spatial contexts and of examining the impact of social- structural change on ‘delinquent’ youth. Given that swathes of Europe are currently beset by conditions of austerity, collaboration amongst European crime historians and criminologists is especially timely

Convicts and the cultural significance of tattooing in nineteenth-century Britain

This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a wide range of subjects, affinities and interests from wider popular and even mainstream culture. The diverse occupations held by convicts, the contexts in which tattoos were created, and incidental references to tattooing in other parts of society all point to a growing phenomenon that was embedded in Victorian culture rather than constituting an expression of deviance or resistance. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, tattooing became fashionable within elite society. These findings not only shed light on the significance of tattooing as a form of cultural expression but also undermine the myth that nineteenth-century criminality was the product of a distinct “criminal class.