Abstract
This article examines encounters of women with the criminal justice system in Wales during the century before the Courts of Great Sessions were abolished in 1830. Drawing on evidence from cases of sexual assault and homicide, it argues that women who killed were rarely convicted or punished harshly. A gendered discretion of sorts also acted against rape victims, as trials never resulted in conviction. Using violence as a lens, the paper reveals a distinctively Welsh approach to criminal justice, and offers quantitative evidence on which further comparative studies of the history of law and crime in England and Wales may be based.
Highlights
The procedures through which the criminal law was enforced cannot be separated from the social, cultural and economic settings in which the law functioned.[1]
Every woman accused of homicide in Georgian Wales walked away from court, perhaps to be met by community sanctions but safe from the ignominy of the gallows
As women were subject to corporal punishment, in the form of whipping, with apparently higher frequency than in England, the Welsh tradition of dispute resolution would seem to have tempered the application of the criminal law : the English banished or hanged offenders, but the Welsh shamed and reintegrated them by means of a public trial and possible corporal sentence
Summary
The procedures through which the criminal law was enforced cannot be separated from the social, cultural and economic settings in which the law functioned.[1]. WATSON interpersonal violence : as victims of sexual assault and perpetrators of homicide It adopts a holistic perspective absent from most historical studies of gender and crime in Britain, which consider women as either victims or perpetrators.[5] comparisons with English findings in the same period test the degree to which the Welsh differed in their use and experience of the criminal law. Such a methodology permits novel insights into the gendered nature of criminal justice from two different female perspectives, while the focus on Welsh women, whose history has only recently begun to be explored,[6] contributes to our understanding of gender distinctions in one of the most under-researched constituent nations of the United Kingdom. Using violence as a lens, this paper reveals a distinctively Welsh approach to criminal justice
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