Imprisonment of Female Urban and Rural Offenders in Victoria, 1860-1920

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.

Women, Old Age, and Imprisonment in Victoria, Australia 1860–1920

“…theft and prostitution) than in Melbourne. Findings supporting the need to consider rural versus urban residence when examining women's offending have been noted for both historical (Nagy and Piper, 2019) and contemporary Australian women's offending (DeKeseredy, 2015), and this research demonstrates that it should be extended to age as an additional variable.…”

“…There were slightly more mobile (that is offenders in rural and urban locations) and rural-only offenders amongst the older women than in the general female prisoner cohort. When averaged overall, 4.5 per cent of all women were mobile offenders (Nagy and Piper, 2019), on the other hand, women over the age of 50 accounted for 5.1 per cent of those convicted by courts in multiple geographic locations. Their crimes were predominantly for disorder, indecent or riotous conduct, or vagrancy.…”

“…Female offenders of all ages could be found committing a wide array of offences throughout Victoria in the past just like their male counterparts (Piper and Nagy, 2017;Piper and Nagy, 2018;Nagy and Piper, 2019). Some crimes were certainly more gendered than others; prostitution, abortion, disorderly behaviour, and vagrancy were primarily policed in Australia to control women, their bodies and behaviour (Allen, 1990).…”

Gender, intimate partner homicide, and rurality in early-twentieth-century New South Wales

“…The analysis of rural versus urban crime in Australia has relied on state capitals to stand for "urban" settlements (Nagy 2021;Nagy and Piper 2019;Piper and Finnane 2017a). Ironically, this approach highlights urbanity, since it describes the balance of the state (in NSW, over 300,000 square miles) as "rural" territory.…”