METODOLOGÍA DE EVALUACIÓN

Scholarly investigation of the links between family structure, intergenerational delinquency, and individual offending are few and far between. Most of the studies that exist are modern sociological and criminological accounts that focus particularly on the familial transmission of offending, rather than historical works.494 Godfrey, Cox, and Farrall’s work in 2007 remains one of the only historiographical examinations of the family background and experiences of offenders, offering analysis of the gendered and short term transmission of crime amongst their sample of Crewe offenders.495 The literature on intergenerational and family offending draws from two datasets, the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS), and the 411 male London youths sampled for the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD). Scholars working with these resources have produced a diverse and highly interesting range of findings, however, current scholarly work on this area remain focussed on not only male criminality, but on men who lived, worked, and offended largely in the twentieth century. Clearly, in terms of familial relationships and social interaction, women of the nineteenth century

494

T. Thornberry, ‘ Explaining Multiple Patterns of Offending across the Life Course and across Generations’, Annals

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 602 (2005). See also: S. Besemer and D. Farrington

‘Intergenerational transmission of criminal behaviour: Conviction trajectories of Fathers and their children’ in

European Journal of Criminology, 9, 2 (2012), pp 120-141. A. Ramakers, C. Bijleveld and S. Ruiter, ‘Escaping the

Family Tradition: A Multi-Generation Study of Occupational Status and Criminal Behaviour’ in British journal of

Criminology, 51, 5 (2012), pp. 856-874. S. Besemer, ‘The impact of timing and frequency of parental criminal

behaviour and risk factors on offspring offending’, in Psychology, Crime & Law, (2012), pp. 1-22. A. Putkonen, O. Ryynanen, M. Eronen and J. Tiihonen, ‘Transmission of violent offending and crime across three generations’, in

Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 42, 2 (2007), pp. 94-99. D. Rowe and D. Farrington, ‘The Familial

Transmission of Criminal Convictions’, in Criminology, 35, 1 (1997). Pp. 177-202.

495

188 differ significantly from their modern male equivalents. The impact that family structure and intergenerational transmission of offending had on female offenders in the nineteenth century is still very much unknown by historians.

Information available for the profiled female offenders from Liverpool and London offers the opportunity to begin to redress this balance. The information collected over their life course makes it possible to collate information as to their family backgrounds, early life experiences, and subsequent life and offending trajectories. Thus, the object of this chapter is to use the historical data collected for female offenders to explore some of the most prominent hypotheses about the impact of familial background and structure on later offending, offered by modern criminologists. Three primary areas of female offenders’ family experiences will be examined. These are parental age and offenders as a product of ‘young mothers’, the impact of family size in recourse to crime, and most significantly, an investigation of the likelihood of intergenerational transmission of offending.

Young Motherhood, Parental Death, and Offending

Criminologists have assessed that those ‘who were born to women who began childbearing at an early age are at greater risk of criminality’.496 Those aged twenty- one or under at the time of their children’s birth identified by modern scholars as ‘young’ parents. Two suggested explanation are offered for why this occurs, which seem as if they might hold relevance not only for twentieth century male juveniles, but for female offenders in the nineteenth century also. The first is the ‘persistent poor parenting – role model’ explanation, which suggests that parents under the age of twenty one transmit a propensity for delinquent behaviour to their children because

496

D.S. Nagin, G. Pogarsky and D. P. Farrington, ‘Adolescent Mothers and the Criminal Behaviour of Their Children’ in Law & Society Review, 31, 1 (1997), p . 137.

189 they themselves are inexperienced and immature. Such parents exhibit perpetually bad parenting techniques towards their children, catering poorly for their moral and social development.497 The result of this is that their children are at increased risk of becoming offenders. The second impact of young motherhood on children is that of ‘diminished resources’. Younger mothers are less likely to be able to provide for their offspring and this can cause long-lasting deprivation in the lives of children who then are more likely to go onto offend. ‘Diminished resources’ refers not only to financial resources, but also social and cultural resources, such as access to education or tools for development such as books, and also factors like parental attention, and level of supervision given to children.498 These children, Nagin contends, were more likely to engage in problem behaviours such as ‘running away, fighting, stealing, and smoking’, and later to other more serious offences.499

Only ten of the profiled women (10%) could be traced as being born to ‘young’ mothers.500 Two of these women also had young fathers. One additional woman had just a young father. Being born to a young mother, or father for that matter, was not a common factor in the lives and experiences of female offenders. It is perhaps most worth noting that, in terms of Victorian female offenders, modern definitions of ‘young motherhood’ are largely unhelpful. Whilst men and women below the age of twenty- one in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries might well be perceived as ‘young’ by the society to which they belong, in the nineteenth century young men and women regularly entered full time employment from the age of thirteen and fourteen, and particularly for women, marriage and childbirth from the age of sixteen onwards was

497

Nagin, Pogarsky and Farrington, ‘Adolescent Mothers’, p. 144.

498

Ibid, p. 146.

499

Ibid, p. 138.

500

Young motherhood is here defined as twenty-one years of age or younger, the same as Nagin’s modern study, and just below the national average age for women to marry in the Victorian era suggested by Robert Wood (further details below).

190 not uncommon. In this sense, the current idea of ‘young’ parenthood becomes a somewhat meaningless category of analysis.

There was a larger proportion of the sampled women (29%) whowere the children of women who had become mothers below the age of twenty-one, but very few of these could be traced as being ‘young’ in the Victorian sense of the word. Yet as Nagin, Pogarsky, and Farrington rightly point out, not enough studies make the clear distinction between the experience of being the child of a woman who gave birth to any child at a young age, and the subject being themselves a child of a young mother - even though there can be an obvious difference in these experiences.501 For example, Ann Weller was born when her mother was just nineteen, and despite no evidence of material need, Ann went on to commit a number of petty offences, which she claimed were a ploy to get the attention of her family.502 Whereas Honorah Connell’s mother had delivered her first child at twenty-one years old, but she was forty –one by the time Honorah (later an offending domestic servant and mother of one illegitimate child) was born.503 Both of these women would come under the same ‘young mother’ bracket, but clearly had completely different experiences, neither of which seem to have been particularly determined by their mother’s age. With experiences as diverse as women who committed just one violent crime in an act of desperation, or women who offended a small number of times during the advanced years of their lives, to some of the youngest, and most prolific offenders in the sample, and with women ranging from the comfortable, to the destitute in terms of socio-economic experience, there is no clear trend, or difference between those offenders born to mothers under

501

Nagin, Pogarsky and Farrington, ‘Adolescent Mothers’, p. 139.

502

See chapter 4.

503

Census Returns of England and Wales, 1851, Class: HO107; Piece: 1490; Folio: 253; Page: 2; GSU roll: 87817-

87818. See also; Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861, Class: RG 9; Piece: 74; Folio: 26; Page: 50; GSU

191 twenty-one, and the rest of the offenders in the sample. What is clear, that none of the offenders could be traced as being born to women who would have been classified as ‘young mothers’ during the nineteenth century.

On average, the age of mothers of offending women at which they had their first child was twenty-two and a half years of age, and mothers were on average twenty-seven and a half years old when they gave birth to the sampled offender. There is not a wealth of historiographical literature pertaining to the age at which Victorian women might have their first child, however, studies of nuptuality and fertility in the period suggest that the average age women marrying in England around the mid-nineteenth century (and thus a good indicator of the ages at which they were likely to have their first children) was nationally between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five years old. At the county level, women in Lancashire were likely to first marry between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-four years, and in London between twenty-four and twenty-five years of age.504 Generally speaking then, the mothers of the sampled female offenders appear to have been fairly indistinguishable from mothers of non- offenders, and reflective of the national average age and stage of the life-cycle at which women typically married and had their first children. At over twenty-five years of age when the offenders were born, on average, the parents of the sampled women were certainly not ‘young’. This effectively removed discussion of female criminality in the Victorian period as a product of the poor parenting practices of young and inexperienced mothers and fathers.

Yet, as Nagin, Pogarsky, and Farrington do qualify in their modern study, perhaps poor parental practices are not a product of age in and of itself at all, arguing that, ‘maternal

504

N. F. R. Crafts, ‘Average Age at First Marriage for Women in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England and Wales: A Cross-Section Study’, in Population Studies (March 1978), Vol. 32, Issue 1, p.22.

192 childbearing age cannot be a causal factor per se rather, it is a marker for problems in the child’s environment that are shaping his development’.505 These factors might relate to the modern problems associated with early motherhood such as social ostracism, poor housing, sustained poverty, and ‘diminished resources’.506 Although these factors are most commonly experienced in the modern era by young mothers and single parent families, in the Victorian age most of these factors persisted in many working-class families, which the majority of the sampled women were part of.507 Many of these conditions were thus not linked to the age of offenders’ mother or father at parenthood, but instead endemic amongst the families at the bottom of the socio-economic scale to which most female offenders belonged.

The death of a parent during childhood or adolescent years was an event that could intensify the social and economic deprivation within a family, and in this way contribute to the conditions outlined above, which have been linked with offending. The death of a parent before adulthood effected a significant number of the profiled women. Twenty-eight (28%) of the women had lost their father before adulthood, with twenty (20%) of the women having lost their father between the ages of birth and sixteen. Likewise, fourteen (14%) of the sampled women had lost their mothers before adulthood, with ten (10%) of them being under the age of sixteen when this occurred. A total of thirty-three (33%) of the women could be traced as having lost at least one parent before the age of sixteen, and more than this had lost a parent before reaching legal adult status. Only four of these women had already begun offending before the death of their parent. Humphries found that ‘petty crime’, such as shoplifting, or the theft of small amounts of money, carried out by those with diminished resources, was

505

Nagin, Pogarsky and Farrington, ‘Adolescent Mothers’, p. 141

506

Ibid, p. 145.

507

193 not only prominent amongst unskilled families, and those in which there were regular bouts of unemployed, but that they were most common to ‘one parent families’ also.508 Table 5. Table 5.1. 508

S. Humphries, ‘Steal to Survive: the Social Crime of Working Class Children 1890-1940’ in Oral History, 9, 1 (1981), p. 24

Age of Offender at Death of Father Frequency Percent

Adult 54 54.0 Child 14 14.0 Infant 6 6.0 Young Adult 8 8.0 Unknown 18 18.0 Total 100 100.0

194

For example, Eliza Garrett

was born in Pimlico,

London, in 1855, to Eliza, and her blacksmith husband, William.509 An ordinary family, the Garrett’s lived a respectable existence, with their eldest child Jane growing up to be a shopkeeper, and their son William, a printer.510 Tragedy struck the family when Eliza Snr. died shortly after the birth of her sixth child, Henry, in 1866. It is not difficult to imagine the effect this would have had on the eleven year old Eliza. Although it is not exactly clear how Eliza dealt with this in the following two years, by the age of fourteen, she had left the family home (despite the rest of family continuing to live together) and was passing for sixteen years of age, renting her own lodgings. It was also at this age that Eliza had her first criminal conviction – five years for stealing belongings from passengers on the Great Northern Railway.511 Although this was Eliza’s first recorded offence, her sentence was severe on account of the evidence she had been carrying out this behaviour for some time, and also the inference that she had corrupted other young friends of hers to join in the activity.512 None of Eliza’s older siblings offended, but they were occupied in paid employments. Eliza’s first

509

PCOM4; Piece: 56; Item: 1.

510

Census Returns of England and Wales, 1871, Class: RG10; Piece: 246; Folio: 56; Page: 37; GSU roll: 824909.

511

England & Wales Criminal Registers, November 1869, Class: HO 27; Piece: 153; Page: 248.

512

Morning Post, 4 November 1869.

Age of Offender at death of Mother Frequency Percent

Life Stage Adult 68 68.0 Child 6 6.0 Infant 4 4.0 Young Adult 4 4.0 Unknown 18 18.0 Total 100 100.0

195 criminal activity appears to be part of her effort to financially contribute to her own upkeep, and perhaps her family also, it may also have been the product of personal and emotional instability for the fourteen year old after the loss of a parent.

Family Size, and Family Position of Offenders

The other familial factor which has been identified by modern criminologists and historians alike as contributing to offending, is family size and structure. The larger a family, the higher the chance were that the diminishing financial and personal resources of parents would have a negative impact on children and contributing to their later offending. For twenty-one of the female offenders (21%) it was not possible to verify if they had siblings. For another twenty women (20%) they appeared to be only or only surviving children of their parents (they were illegitimate children of lone parents, orphans, or the only child that survived the ages of one to nine, for example). For the 59 women whose siblings could be identified, they tended to have on average four siblings. Average family size could of course vary not only by class (working-class families were likely to have more children), but by location also. Several studies have suggested that the average family size in the mid-nineteenth century was between four and six children per household. Whilst Garrett, Reid, Schurer and Szreter suggested that over a third of married women of the offender’s generation ‘experienced at least seven live births and as many as 15 per cent had ten or more confinements’, most population studies place average family size below this number.513 In his demographic history of England and Wales, Wood suggested that the number of children an average woman might expect to have during her fertile years was between five and six, a figure which he argues sharply declined after the

513

E. Garrett, A. Reid, K. Schurer and S. Szreter, Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and

196 1860.514 Of the profiled offenders who’s family details could be fully ascertained, the number of children in each family seems to roughly reflect the national average for families at this time, even if the number is smaller than we might reasonably expect in a time period with no effective birth control bar abstinence, and a sample with a large proportion of Irish Catholic families. Work carried out by Farrington and West suggests that the size of a ‘large’ family did not have to be excessive for it to have an impact on the offending trajectories of children. The 1973 study suggested that, ‘if a boy had four or more siblings by his tenth birthday, this doubled his risk of being convicted as a juvenile’.515 If criminological data suggests that four siblings is the family size tipping point for producing offenders, although most of the Victorian women I have sampled did not offend as juveniles, their crowded homes could well indicate how the social and economic family driven factors that link to offending arose. After all, many of their offences can be described as ‘rooted in a context of class inequality and the day to day demands of the family economy’.516

The likelihood of large family size contributing to the poverty, diminished resources, and the reduced parental supervision that could lead to offending is thought by some scholars to worsen for each additional child.517 However, the family structure of the sampled Victorian women would seem to contradict this. The position of women amongst their siblings could be ascertained for seventy- nine of the sampled offenders. Most of the profiled women (51% of sample / 64% of those with traced siblings) were the oldest female child in their family. According to Roberts, as the oldest female children in their families, girls ‘acted as apprentices to their mothers, or even their

514

R. Woods, The Demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), pp. 4-5.

515

D. Farrington, ‘Childhood Risk Factors and Risk-Focussed Prevention’, in Maguire, Morgan, and Rainer, Oxford

Handbook of Criminology, p. 614.

516

Humphries, ‘Steal to Survive’, p.25.

517