Rural and Urban Female Offending in Victoria 1860-1920

This paper draws upon a longitudinal dataset that includes 6,042 women who were imprisoned in Victoria between 1860 and 1920. This data has been used to examine women’s offending in rural and urban environments around Victoria during this 60-year period to consider not only how many criminal acts were committed in each region but also the mobility of women between environments and how their offending changed according to this movement. Results indicate that women who offended only in rural or regional areas of Victoria showed marked differences in their offending patterns than women who offended within urban environments, and that the 4.5% of the sample who were convicted in both urban and rural courtrooms showed greater offending diversity than urban-only offenders. This research contributes to our understanding of Australian rural and urban female criminality and has implications for how the complexity in female offending is approached in policing and sentencing.