Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship Awarded to OU Professor of History

Professor Clive Emsley has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship, which will allow him to continue his research on "Crime and the British Military in the 20th Century" for another 2 years after his retirement in September 2009. He is currently Professor of History and co-director of the International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research (ICCCR) at the Open University.

Prof Emsley says "Most crime is (and has been) committed by young men, and most military personnel are (and have always been) young men. The end of wars in Britain, since the eighteenth century, has witnessed fears that men, trained to kill and brutalised by the experience of battle, will find it difficult to return to civilian life and will continue to act violently, and hence criminally at home. Focussing primarily on the two world wars of the twentieth century, this research project will explore the scale of criminality by men in the armed forces and their behaviour at the wars’ ends."

"The aim of this project is to explore two distinct aspects of crime and the British Military during the twentieth century. First, there are the issues of the extent and variety of offending by soldiers: second, there is the problem of soldiers returning from conflict and the extent to which their experiences fostered subsequent criminal behaviour."

"It is generally recognised that most crime is committed by young men. The majority of soldiers are young men and it has often been commented upon how conventional crime declined in wartime and how juveniles and women appeared in greater percentages before the courts. Army provosts, and those relatively few military historians that have commented upon crime, have tended to use the positivist assumption that offenders in uniform were simply ‘professional criminals’ that had been recruited or conscripted. The initial aim of the project is to explore the kinds of crimes committed by soldiers in wartime on both the home and the battle fronts and the extent of this crime. The basic hypotheses to be tested are that:

• There was remarkably little difference between offences committed by civilians and offences committed by soldiers; however,
• In some instances, war provided new opportunities or new pressures to commit crime.

The fear of the brutalised veteran returning home to commit violent offences has a long history. The acknowledgement of the problem of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, commonly described in Britain as ‘shell-shock’, began during the First World War. Soldiers before civilian courts began to use the disorder as a defence before the end of the war. Nevertheless, while there has been research on the history of the concept and its gradual acceptance, there have been few attempts to explore its impact on criminal offending."

"The second aim of the project is to explore the concerns about brutalised veterans – as reflected in the comments of experts and in the popular media – together with the reality of such veterans appearing before the courts. The basic hypotheses to be tested here are that:

• In the euphoria of victory, there was also an underlying climate of fear about brutalised veterans; however,
• While there may have been some sympathy for men who responded violently (but not with lethal results) to wives that had been unfaithful, there was little serious appreciation of men that had been seriously psychologically damaged by their experiences and who, in consequence, drifted into drunkenness and violent offending."

The research will take place in London, Fareham and Brussels and the principal outcome of the project will be a book and at least one conference paper at the European Social Science History Conference in Ghent in 2010.