‘A Shocking State of Domestic Unhappiness’: Male Victims of Female Violence and the Courts in Late Nineteenth Century Stafford

Abstract

Instances where men were the victims of female violence in the past are very difficult to explore, especially when the violence took place in a domestic setting. There is now a notable body of work on violence in the nineteenth century but none that looks specifically at male victims of violence where there was a female perpetrator, and their treatment by the courts. This article goes some way in filling that gap by using data collected in researching female offenders at the end of the nineteenth century in Stafford. It argues that, as with violence where there was a female victim and female perpetrator, the courts and the press were similarly unconcerned and somewhat dismissive of female violence towards men in a domestic setting, thus being unsympathetic towards male victims of female violence.

Editors’ Introduction: ‘Access to Justice: Historical Approaches to Victims of Crime’

“…Jo Turner's article explores prosecutions of violence involving alleged assaults on male victims by female perpetrators in an English Midland town, Stafford, in the late nineteenth century. Using legal and newspaper records, she argues that both the courts and the press were dismissive of violence towards men in domestic settings, and that this contributed to low rates of prosecution and conviction [3]. Ben Jarman and Caroline Lanskey's article investigates child abuse in youth custodial institutions in England and Wales during the second half of the twentieth century.…”