Statistics on Violence

A more descriptive post on violence is here. The data below do not cover violence resulting from war (statistics on war are here).

Content

1. Overview and a word of caution
2. Fatal interpersonal violence, i.e. homicide
3. Honor killing
4. Non-fatal interpersonal violence
5. Self-inflicted violence; suicide
6. Collective violence and war
7. Terrorist violence
8. Judicial violence, i.e. torture and the death penalty
9. The worst atrocities in history

1. Overview and a word of caution

Worldwide, an estimated 1,6 million people lose their lives to violence each year. That’s a rate of almost 30 people per 100.000. About half of these are suicides and obviously not human rights violations. However, one-third are homicides and one-fifth are casualties of armed conflict (World Report on Violence and Health, World Health Organization), and therefore prima facie rights violations.

Violence is among the leading causes of death for people aged 15–44 years worldwide, accounting for 14% of deaths among males and 7% of deaths among females.

In the more detailed data below, you’ll see that levels of violence are decreasing as time goes by. However, I have to stress the uncertainty in many of these numbers, especially the numbers about premodern times. If you see how difficult it is to establish more or less correct and uncontroversial data on casualties in the Iraq war for instance, you can imagine the error margin for periods without surveys, Wikileaks, satellite images, peer review, official documents, the internet etc.

Still, even if we assume a large margin of error, the trend is still downwards for many indicators of violence, and this is particularly the case for more recent periods for which the sources are presumably better. And yet, if we try to understand the causes of this downward trend, those may not be the ones we wish for. Instead of progress of humanity, modernity, democratic peace theory etc. one cause may be simply Mutually Assured Destruction. Hence, downturns may be temporary and can be suddenly reversed by other effects of the same causes (in this example, nuclear holocaust).

Notwithstanding these concerns, I do think that there are also more beneficial causes of decreasing violence, such as scientific rationality (allowing us to abstract from particulars and take a more general view, and hence also a view taken by others), the democratic peace theory (there are now more democracies than ever before, and the data suggest that democracies don’t fight each other), or the “widening circle of empathy”:

• people’s of the third world are no longer considered to be objects of exploitation or violent reform;
• many countries now have strong protection mechanisms for minorities;
• and economic globalization has delivered not only the realization that violence has now a higher economic cost than ever before, but has also widened and deepened understanding and affinity among nations.

Another remark: if there really is a robust and longterm downward trend in violence caused by strong and non-counterproductive causes (hence excluding things like M.A.D.), then one may be tempted to conclude that humanity as a whole is progressing. And this temptation should be resisted. There is no such thing a “human progress” in my view. History is not a whole, moving ineluctably through various stages of progress towards a certain ideal end state (perhaps with the occasional but temporary backward lapse). Humanity gets better at some things, some of the time, but then loses it, or it gets worse at other things at the same time. Ironically, the view that history is a whole progressing towards a better state has been the cause of the one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, namely communism (it’s estimated that communism has been responsible for 67 million deaths). I should also mention that one area of human progress, namely scientific progress, contributed significantly to other modern catastrophes, namely Hiroshima, M.A.D. and the Holocaust (which was in essence the first scientific and industrial genocide).

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2. Fatal interpersonal violence, i.e. homicide

An estimated 520.000 people were killed in 2000 as a result of interpersonal violence worldwide – a rate of 8,8 per 100.000 population. (source). Central America has an average rate of 29 victims per 100,000 people, followed by Southern Africa (27) and the Caribbean (22); in comparison, the homicide rate in the United States was 4.5. The murder rate in Honduras is 82/100,000, one of the worst in the world.

Here’s a world map with the number of murders or homicides per 100.000 inhabitants during the last years:

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

And here are the same data for some selected countries:

(source)

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Presented in a more interesting manner:

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

And this is the evolution over time:

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This is how the homicide rate in the U.K. evolved during the last decades:

(source, click image to enlarge)

And this is how the homicide rate in the U.S. evolved during the last decades and centuries:

(source)

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All in all, this is still almost 20.000 murders a year in the U.S. Americans kill one another at a much higher rate than do residents of comparable western European nations. This gap persists despite a roughly 40 percent drop in the US homicide rate in the last 15 years or so. Americans have been notably more violent than western Europeans since about the mid- or late 19th century. Some possible explanation in the cyclical patterns in the graphs above are demobilization after wars (with trained, armed and traumatized fighters roaming the land), prohibition and resulting gang violence, economic crises etc. (More data on crime in the US are here).

(source)

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3. Non-fatal interpersonal violence

One particularly gruesome form of murder is honor killing.

• The UN estimates that around 5,000 women and girls are murdered each year in so-called “honor killings” by members of their families
• “Honor” killings are widely reported in regions throughout the Middle East and South Asia, but these crimes against women occur in countries as varied as Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and the United States.
• Like other forms of violence against women, “honor” violence against women may be considered a form of torture, whether enacted by the state or by an individual.
• While “honor” crime is committed predominantly against women and girls, “honor” crime is also on the rise against LGBT people, particularly gay men
• In many countries, the punishment for “honor” crimes are inadequate or non-existent—laws either do not recognize “honor” crime or have insufficient sentencing for such crime. And in countries where laws have been passed to curb “honor” crime (for example, in Jordan), such laws often go un-enforced.
• According to the Iranian and Kurdish Rights Organization, “Honor Killings are on the rise”, especially in Europe and the US. (source)

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4. Non-fatal interpersonal violence

For every person who dies as a result of violence, many more are injured and suffer other harms (psychological, financial etc.). One example is rape. The following graph shows the number of attempted and completed cases of rape in the U.S.:

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Here are some data on domestic violence in the U.S.:

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(source, click image to enlarge)

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5. Self-inflicted violence; suicide

Globally, an estimated 815.000 people killed themselves in 2000 (source). About 10 out of every 100,000 Americans commit suicide. Over 1 million adult Americans (0.5% of the total) say they attempted suicide in the past year.

(source)

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It may sound strange, but suicide is more common than homicide in the U.S. (one of the more violent countries):

(source)

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6. Collective violence and war

This includes armed conflicts within or between states, and state-perpetrated violence such as genocide, torture, repression, some kinds of famine and poverty, and other gross violations of human rights.

Since the beginning of recorded history, around 3600 BC, over 14.500 major wars have killed close to four billion people.

During the 20th century, one of the most violent periods in human history, an estimated 191 million people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of armed conflict, and well over half of them were civilians. In 2000, about 310 000 people died as a direct result of conflict-related injuries – the majority of them in the poorer parts of the world. (source)

More data on violent conflict are here.

It’s estimated that around 170 million people were killed in the world’s many genocides.

genocide deaths per 100000 human beings

(source)

Some more detail about the Nazi holocaust:

(source)

The Crusades went on for more than a century and resulted in the killing of a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust. The Inquisition killed 10,000 people over six centuries. Christians killed  between 60,000 and 100,000 accused witches in the European witch-hunts that lasted for over 3 centuries. Perhaps twenty million were killed (not counting unintentional epidemics) by the European settlement of the Americas.

Lynching cost the lives of thousands of African Americans:

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One could argue that stoning is a form of lynching:

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7. Terrorist violence

More data on terrorist attacks are here. Regarding the number of US citizens killed by terrorism:

There were just 25 U.S. noncombatant fatalities from terrorism worldwide [in 2009]. (The US government definition of terrorism excludes attacks on U.S. military personnel). While we don’t have the figures at hand, undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism. (source)

Makes you wonder whether the war on terror and the massive rights violations that it produces are the right price to pay, doesn’t it?

More statistics on terrorism are here.

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8. Judicial violence, i.e. torture and the death penalty

abolition of torture as a form of judicial punishment

(source)

And although the U.S. is the only Western country still applying the death penalty, at least it stopped applying it for crimes other than murder:

US executions for crimes other than murder

(source)

[I]n the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, the death penalty was prescribed and used for theft, sodomy, bestiality, adultery, witchcraft, concealing birth, slave revolt, counterfeiting, and horse theft. We have statistics for capital punishment in the United States since colonial times. … [I]n the 17th century a majority of executions were for crimes other than homicide. In current times, the only crime that is punished by capital punishment other than homicide is conspiracy to commit homicide. … In 18th century England there were 222 capital offenses on the books, including poaching, counterfeiting, robbing a rabbit warren, being in the company of gypsies, and “strong evidence of malice in a child seven to 14 years of age.” By 1861 the number of capital crimes was down to four. (source)

And not only the number of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed has been reduced; also the number of cases for the remaining crime of murder has gone down:

number of death sentences in the US

In Europe, the practice has almost vanished:

capital punishment in Europe

(source)

More statistics on capital punishment here.

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9. The worst atrocities in history

Here an overview and ranking of the worst atrocities in history (note: I deleted deaths from civil and international war from this chart and, as a result, the ranking numbers show gaps; the deleted parts can be found here):

(source; click image to enlarge)

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