Victims and Criminal Justice is the first study of its kind to examine both the origins and impacts of key legal, procedural, and institutional changes introduced in England and Wales to encourage and govern prosecution. It sets out how crime victims' experiences of, and engagement with, the process of criminal justice changed dramatically between the late seventeenth and late twentieth centuries. Where victims once drove the English criminal justice system, bringing prosecutions as complainants and prosecutors, giving evidence as witnesses, putting up personal rewards for the recovery of lost goods or claim rewards for securing convictions, by the end of this period, victims had been firmly displaced as the state took virtually full responsibility for the process of prosecution.

Combining qualitative analysis of a range of textual sources with quantitative analysis of large datasets featuring over 200,000 criminal prosecutions, the authors explore how victims were defined in law, what the law allowed and encouraged them to do, who they were in social and economic terms, how they participated in the criminal justice system, why many were unwilling or unable to engage in that system, and why some campaigned for specific rights. In exploring the shift in victim participation in criminal trials, Victims and Criminal Justice places current policy debates in a much-needed critical historical context.