Abstract
This paper examines imprisonment data from Victoria between 1860 and 1920 to gather insights into the variations in incidence of women being convicted by rural versus urban courts, including close focus on the difference in types of offences being committed in urban and rural locations. This paper also details women’s mobility between both communities as well as change in their offending profiles based on their geographic locations. Our findings suggest that while the authorities were broadly most concerned with removing disorderly and vagrant women from both urban and rural streets, rural offending had its own characteristics that differentiate it from urban offending. Therefore, this demonstrates that when examining female offending, geographic location of an offender and offence must be taken into consideration.
Highlights
Criminologists have traditionally focused their attention on crime in the urban environment, in Australian literature and internationally (Carrington 2007; DeKeseredy 2015)
The literature has argued that the bucolic image of regional and rural Australia as a place of peace, tranquillity and safety is not based on reality, with rural communities often facing similar crime rates and issues as urban environments (Carcach 2000; Carrington 2007; Hogg and Carrington 2006; Jobes et al 2000)
This article examines the offending patterns of 6,042 women imprisoned for the first time in the Australian state of Victoria between 1860 and 1920; of this group geographic data is noted for 6,027 prisoners
Summary
Criminologists have traditionally focused their attention on crime in the urban environment, in Australian literature and internationally (Carrington 2007; DeKeseredy 2015). This article examines the offending patterns of 6,042 women imprisoned for the first time in the Australian state of Victoria between 1860 and 1920; of this group geographic data is noted for 6,027 prisoners This dataset represents the first longitudinal study of women’s criminality in Australia and one of the largest studies of historic female offending to date. Historical research into female offending in Victoria has typically concentrated on those crimes perceived to be most heavily gendered, sex work and reproduction-related offences (Finch and Stratton 1988; Frances 2007; Goc 2013; Laster 1989; McConville 1980; Rychner 2017) The former has been described as being located most heavily within Melbourne or on the goldfields, while the latter—that is, abortion— has typically been depicted as a mostly urban crime, with rural women travelling to the city to procure the service. The high marriage rates among women in rural areas that resulted from the sex imbalance in many of those regions was liable to have had a reducing effect on female crime within those environments, given the historical correlation between female offending and lack of a male provider (Piper 2015)
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