Historical Datasets for Victims' Access to Justice Project, 1674-1975

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.These historical datasets were created by the ESRC funded project, ‘Victims' access to justice through English criminal courts, 1675 to the present’ , carried out between 2018 and 2022. This interdisciplinary project examined public access to justice in England over more than three centuries - from the 1670s to the present. Bringing together leading criminologists and crime historians, it assembled and analysed data on over 235,000 victims involved in trials at the Old Bailey in London in order to understand the rights of, and resources and services available to, victims in the past, present and future. It constructed a new evidence base to establish who these victims were, how they came to be complainants, prosecutors or witnesses, and how they made use of available legal and financial resources. The project director was Pamela Cox and the other co-investigators were Barry Godfrey, Ruth Lamont, Robert Shoemaker, Heather Shore, and Sandra Walklate. Lucy Williams and Elisa Impara were research officers. The results of the data analysis were reported in a monograph: Pamela Cox, Robert Shoemaker and Heather Shore, Victims and Criminal Justice: A History (Oxford University Press, 2023). An additional contemporary dataset was created for the project using aggregated data on crime victims from the Crime Survey for England and Wales 1982-2017. It may be accessed via the UK Data Archive. There are six datasets in this deposit.  Two contain information pertaining to all victims of crimes prosecuted at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913, derived from  the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (all fields and clean fields); two contain information on victims manually extracted from the Times newspaper between 1910-25 and 1960-75 (all fields and clean fields); data on a sample of Trial Participants at the Old Bailey between 1805 and 1900, collected manually; and judicial statistics extracted from the Parliamentary Papers from 1805-1879.Main Topics:Victims' role in criminal justice, 1674 to the present.