Gender, Victimisation and Prosecutorial Discretion in the Attrition of Sexual Offences

This study is the first systematic historical examination ofabandonment of sexual offence cases in common lawjurisdictions. Examining the records of hundreds ofdiscontinued prosecutions from the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries reveals patterns in thesediscontinuations. At the macro level, abandonment insexual offence cases differed from that for other violentcrime, with discontinuation related to case characteristicssuch as the age and sex of the complainant; young womenwere the most affected by discontinuations. At theindividual case level, focusing primarily on issuing of nolleprosequi shows that the reasons prosecutors gave forabandonment most often referred to a lack of evidence.Although the theoretical concept of discontinuing aprosecution was based in discretionary, individualiseddecision making, in practice it appears that decisions toprosecute had structural bases in gendered and legalbiases that were often conflated under the umbrella ofcomplainant 'credibility'. These findings are similar tothose in contemporary studies of attrition andprosecutorial discretion, indicating the longevity of theseissues in the prosecution of sexual offences. Theyadditionally highlight a new dimension, in showing theprevalence of judicial direction and intervention inprosecutors' decisions to issue a nolle prosequi

Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data

Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher’s reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregated data. However, by coupling the facilities enabled by the web with the enthusiasm of the public for explorations of the past, history has started to make the same strides towards big data evident in other fields. While the use of citizens to crowdsource research data was first pioneered within the sciences, a number of projects have similarly begun to draw on the help of citizen historians. This article explores the particular example of the Prosecution Project, which since 2014 has been using crowdsourced volunteers on a research collaboration to build a large-scale relational database of criminal prosecutions throughout Australia from the early 1800s to 1960s. The article outlines the opportunities and challenges faced by projects seeking to use web technologies to access, store and re-use historical data in an environment that increasingly enables creative collaborations between researchers and other users of social and historical data

Immigration and criminality: Australia’s post-war inquiries

The relationship between immigration and crime rates has long been a topic of robust debate in criminology and sociology, especially for scholars of the United States. Researchers in those fields have highlighted divergent factors to explain high arrest rates including the presence of ethnic gangs, media reporting, racial profiling, over-policing of immigrant communities, and wider issues of social dislocation brought about by migration. By contrast, historians have given little consideration to the topic. This lack of historical investigation is particularly curious in studies of Australia’s post-war immigration given the political importance of the issue at the time. Immigration and criminality — or more precisely, whether immigrants committed more crime or worse crimes than the Australian-born population — became a prominent topic of media coverage and political interest in the early 1950s. In fact, the question of migrants’ criminality was so important that it was the subject of the first research inquiries ever ordered by the Department of Immigration. our article examines this research, explaining the impetus for the inquiries, their findings, and their historical significance. We conclude by outlining how this topic can illuminate new areas of inquiry in immigration history

The “Good Old Days” of Courtroom Questioning: Changes in the Format of Child Cross-Examination Questions Over 60 Years

Recent decades have seen an explosion of research into children’s eyewitness capabilities and resulted in legal reform to render the adversarial trial process more child friendly. Many, however, have been left with the feeling that the most intimidating legal process for child complainants—cross-examination—has not changed meaningfully despite its potential to distort children’s evidence. To test this possibility, we compared the cross-examination questioning of Australian child sexual abuse complainants in the 1950s to that used in contemporary cases. We found that the format of cross-examination questions has remained largely consistent over time, with leading questions still making up the bulk of the questions asked. The changes that we did observe, however, are concerning. Cross-examination questions posed to contemporary child complainants were less likely to be open-ended and more likely to be complex, relative to those asked in the 1950s. Crucially, contemporary complainants were asked 3 times as many cross-examination questions as they were 60 years ago. These changes are likely to have detrimental effects on child complainants and their evidence and could reduce the ability of jurors to reach just outcomes in these cases

A historical comparison of Australian lawyers’ strategies for cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants

Many child sexual abuse complainants find the adversarial trial process so distressing that they say they would never report abuse again. Their concerns stem largely from cross-examination, in which the lawyer acting for the accused attempts to discredit their evidence. We examined whether—and if so, how—Australian defense lawyers’ approaches to cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants have changed meaningfully over the past 60 years. To do this, we systematically evaluated cases that were prosecuted in the 1950s, comparing them to a matched set of cases from the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the intervening law reforms designed to improve complainants’ experience in court, we found that, relative to their historical counterparts, contemporary child complainants of sexual abuse are actually subjected to far lengthier cross-examinations involving a much broader range of strategies and associated tactics. These findings have important implications for future legal practice and reform, and for the way in which these are evaluated