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UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country
ananyo (2519492) writes "A new UN report (link to data) details comprehensive country-by-country murder rates. Safest is Singapore, with just one killing per 480,000 people in 2012. In the world's most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime. The Economist includes an intriguing 'print only interactive' (see the PDF) and has some tongue-in-cheek tips on how to avoid being slain: 'First, don't live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world. Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. But note that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in the rich world, probably because there is less banditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japan and South Korea slightly over half of all murder victims are female. Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places.'"
In order to live as long as possible, I have decided to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, and I will move to Antarctica and start a utopian lesbian society, since there are no murders there. I haven't worked out the details yet, but it seems like a no-brainer.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
here I come!
I have lived 2 years in Singapore, and indeed it is a tremendously safe place. Nobody worries about taking a shortcut through an alley, something not done in most western cities. It does mean that my local friends were often uncomfortable when traveling abroad, all countries seem dangerous after you've experienced Singapore.
It may not be a democracy, but we have to admit, they do a lot of things RIGHT. It is a pleasure to live there, as long as you have no political ambitions.
I'm willing to bet that Western Europe and Canada numbers are actually pretty accurate. Same with the US numbers. The only places that might underreport are likely to be Russia and 3rd world countries.
The bigger question you need to ask is why is the US so far behind its first world brethren?
Depends on the countries methodology on "homicide" because in one country and another the methodology aren't the same. And organizations are sloppy at going through a year or even several years worth of data to adjust it. My personal favorite was always the suicide and sexual assault numbers. Europeans love to fudge the SA numbers by reclassifying the crimes, and Japan loves to fudge suicide incidents as "not suicide."
Om, nomnomnom...
It is sad as a brazilian to see that we are less than 3% of global population and yet we are responsable for 11% of all murders worldwide (eleven-fucking-percent!!), and I would gess that this number may well be higher because there are a lot of people that just go missing and either there is no one to report it or the police just don't give a damn. We may not be as beligerant as the US or Russia, but we are very agressive against ourselves. And this is only for murders, don't even count violent death in traffic, which would probably double the amount of deaths. :(
Yes, because the U.N. is known for shoddy science.
The data files include the source of the figures, generally reported by the WHO instead of the national police in those countries where the official figures may be suspect. If there are official complaints about the figures, they'll likely come from the ambassador of Bananazuela who will claim that the figures for his tourist-friendly country are too high.
John
A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.
Most of the places where this is a problem are the less developed countries, ones where the data is already suspect for different reasons anyway, and where the numbers are often already high. The really enlightening bits are comparing the first world countries, all of whom have a very similar definition of murder (this is actually much better than generic"violent crime" stats where definitions do vary largely)
What really stands out is that most of the first world countries fall in a range of 1-2 murders per 100000 people per year, except the USA which is more than double that. Always amazing to see how different the USA is than other countries that should be so similar (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, even England) and how the public opinion in the USA is so against any efforts at improving the situation (better education. Health care for all, less inequality, gun control, all the things that have proven to work in the rest of the western world)
not poverty, instead places where family structure has broken down and subcultures do not instill any respect for human life. I know places where poor people are not killing each other. poverty is no excuse
The Economist article mentions that other studies have determined that alcohol is the most common factor in murders in Australia, Finland and Sweden. Searching for more studies related, I noticed the WSJ has an interesting site called Murder in America that allows you to sort and visualize murder information http://projects.wsj.com/murder...
No offense, but us bleeding hearts also blither on quite a bit about income inequality. I think we blither on about that a lot more than we do about gun control, actually.
At least in the US, women kill more men than women.
Also, while gender issues folks are more than happy to do all sorts of mental gymnastics for other things: nobody is willing to touch "why do men commit robbery more?" with a ten foot pole because then they'd have to admit that traditional gender roles for men are still very much in place, men are judged heavily by their economic status, and men are committing crime by and large to house, feed, and clothe their families.
Lots of assistance for single mothers out there, like WIC. Single dads? Shit outta luck.
Guess what percentage of the US homeless population is male? Depending on the area, anywhere from 67% to 80% (NYC, for example, is 82%.) Oh, and the percentage of women in homeless shelters is higher than the percentage of homeless women total, showing women are better served.
Male privilege, my ass.
Please help metamoderate.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
If you read my post, I didn't point the blame "just at guns", in fact they were last on my list after education, health care, and inequality. However now that you bring it up,. Evidence from the rest of the world indicates that guns are a problem, not a solution. I'm not willing to say how much of an effect they have, as I believe that it is the culture, more than the firearms themselves that is the problem, the guns are just a symptom of that culture.
Why the USA is so determined to avoid universal health care and good, accessible, education, is beyond me though, those four items I listed are the biggest differences between the USA and the rest of the western world where murder rates are less than half what they are in the USA, trying to follow those good examples set elsewhere could only help Americans, it's too bad Americans don't want the help.
I've said it before, so I'll say it again. These murder counts are totally useless for anyone who doesn't work in a morgue.
I really don't worry about *all* of the murders. The vast majority of them can't possibly affect me. I want the real number of murders -- the ones of which I ought to be frightened.
I don't care about gang-on-gang violence, I'm not in a gang. I do care about caught-in-crossfire gang-shooting victims.
I don't care about spouses killing spouses nor parents killing children. I don't fear my spouse nor my children.
What's left is a very small miniscule number, at least in my country, of intentional killings from random shootings, caught-in-crossfire, crazy co-workers, mistaken identities, and the like. But no one has ever presented those numbers.
The US murder rate is more than double that of the rest of the western world. Despite the four points I listed being the biggest differences between your country and the other Western democracies. Your personal refusal to even consider any possible improvement in that situation is endemic of the problem that causes your chance of being murdered to be more than double that of any other western citizen.
I'm glad you're OK with your odds, after all, you choose them.
A women may be less likely to be murdered but more likely to be raped.
That's mostly because the FBI doesn't consider prison rape to be a crime; I think the estimates I hear are typically around 200,000-300,000 male prison rape victims a year, which comes close to making the rape stats 50/50. There's also very little interest in figuring out the underreporting rate for male rape victims in open society; hell, in many places it isn't even a crime for a woman to rape a man because of the way rape was defined.
But even if you ignore all that: I'll take those odds. Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crime, and not only that, it's declined the most over the last decade or two as well. Men are several times more likely to be KILLED. Last time I checked, that was worse.
By the way: case clearance rates for female homicide victims are higher than for male homicide victims.
You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.
Please help metamoderate.
Drug use rates in east Asia are pretty low, at least due in part to geographic isolation and/or really strict enforcement. The Singapore government probably puts more people to death for drug crimes than people actually die from drugs or drug related incidents there.
Japan being an island and South Korea for all intents and purposes being an island(their northern border isn't exactly what I would call "porous") has allowed them to strictly enforce drug imports because there are very very few places where an individual can get into the country. In addition to being paranoid about "organic" drugs(opium, cocaine etc) getting into the country, they also crack down on manufactured drugs like meth, to an almost draconian extent. For instance in Japan Nyquil and it's ilk are illegal simply because it can be used as an ingredient in meth, which sucks when you have a cold because Japanese cold medication sucks in my opinion....
Monstar L
What the UN report leaves out is one important factor in the US: about half of the perpetrators and victims of homicide are young African American males, completely out of proportion to their prevalence population; that's what accounts for most of the difference between US and other Western murder rates.
Gun control isn't going to help reduce those murder rates. Nor can those murder rates be explained through racism or bias in the justice system. Until politicians get serious and address this issue, African Americans are going to continue to get killed and locked up at a frightening rate. Unfortunately, our current president has been totally ineffective in doing anything about it.
The Venezuelan government hasn't published violence statistics for years, so NGOs and journalists query the morgues every week. But that doesn't stop the nomenklatura from denouncing the state governed by the most prominent opposition candidate as having "the most murders" (it's not clear, and not too relevant, whether they mean count or rate).
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I have more of a problem with you cherry picking Canada, Australia, NZ, and England, despite those countries having very little in common with the U.S. and causes for violent crime.
The U.S. falls into the category of large, moderately urbanized countries with large open borders to less industrialized countries, high wealth and wealth disparity, and ethnically diverse populations. Most of the western world is not that way at all, and those properties breed the root cause of the majority of violent crime in those countries, which is the illegal drug trade.
Countries that share those features include Russia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and China. Surprise, surprise, those other countries are all at least or much worse off then the U.S. is, despite some having the strictest gun ownership laws in the world (Russia), all having socialized healthcare, and the US. Actually having a pretty good education system for most of the country (not underserved inner-city areas) when reported the same way other countries are.
China is the outlier, in that it does not have either high violent crime rates or a violent drug trade, but my theory is that this is because the vast majority of the country lives in squalor and acts as a buffer to help shield the cities, and those cities have their crime rates dilutes by the shield.
Simple facts are that gun control reduces gun crime but increase violent crime. Education and healthcare raise the standard of living, but don't provide disincentive for crime in the drug trade. You are right about inequality as a facet of this.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
My bad, I'll stop confusing the USA with a first world country.
Guns don't kill people. Gun-obsessed people kill people.
(I suspect the high velocity lumps of lead may play a part too.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The US has inner cities with high crime rates that skew the average, Not only are these inner cities majority black, which makes these statistics very politically incorrect, they also have the strictest gun laws in the country.
If you don't live in one of those places (whatever your skin color), you don't really need to worry about the "high USA crime rate", And we don't have universal health care outside them any more than we do in them, either.
Exactly, which is why you always see mass shootings at gun shows, gun stores, and gun ranges where there's lot of guns, lots of ammunition, and lots of gun-obsessed people.
Thankfully, there are some places where that sort of thing isn't tolerated, like schools, malls, and US Postal offices. Ahh yes, gun-free zones, where violence is a thing of the past.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
or we could decriminalize drugs and let the users kill themselves quietly with their habit.. There would be no need for them to rob anyone.
The story is about the odds of being murdered, and your first sentence was on topic.
The rest was deliriously offtopic. Hence the appropriate moderation, "offtopic". If you don't want to be modded offtopic, then your post should be substantially on topic.
To your on-topic point: I couldn't find a source to quantify your statistic in a short time, though I did find sources which explained that women are way less likely to murder non-family members than men are; and given that women are *way* more likely to have a male spouse than men are, it should not be unexpected that women murder more men than women.
I mean really, why would we expect it to be equal? Spousal murder is a thing, and gay relationships are rare disproportionate to statistically random pairings, therefore one might expect a greater number of cross-sex murders. Really the surprising fact is therefore that men kill more men than women (which I know I've heard elsewhere as well).
Wait a moment, are you saying that there are people who might ignore the gun-free zone signs and carry a gun anyway? What kind of person would even think of doing such a thing?
But your point is well taken. I think the best way to go is to stop everyone but the police and the military from carrying guns, just like they do in Mexico. Then we could enjoy Mexico's legendarily low violent crime rate right here in the United States.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You have no evidence for that - it's just a nice excuse to make you think that the US isn't as messed up as it is. You also seem to be woefully ill-informed of the diversity in many places in Europe which rivals (or beats) the diversity in many violence-soaked places in the US. So to recap: you are making excuses for your country based on nonsense, in some childish attempt to not have to think about the intrinsic issues in the US which makes it one of the most dangerous countries in the developed world. You do realise you, and those who think like you, are causing harm to the US, right? As you gladly dismiss any criticism as being European propaganda, ensuring the harm continues unabated, just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. You're clearly an intelligent person, so I have no idea what happened to you to skew your brain this way.
You'll never get americans to give up their guns: they're all too afraid. What are they so scared of? Yup, all the (other) people with guns. The comments about gun shops and firing ranges being the "safest" places demonstrates this very well. The gun-owners feel safest when surrounded by guns. However when they are out in the big, nasty, world they feel insecure that other people might have weapons they can't see, so the urge to protect themselves becomes very strong.
Obviously, if nobody in the USA had a gun, this level of fear should be reduced, but it's irrational and doesn't work like that. Hence they all keep their guns and that induces more fear - so they feel the need for more and bigger guns, just as a sort of "safety blanket" (as almost none of them are ever fired in the real world) - which, of course, escalates the problem.
It's all because they're all so scared of each other.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Simple facts are that gun control reduces gun crime but increase violent crime.
Simple facts sound rather questionable to me. Your argument about the unique circumstances is specious as well. The biggest problem your borders have is leaking guns to other countries.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Can't wait for the great marijuana death wave that's coming, I take it?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
And usually towards the end of his lifetime.
One of the best arguments for gun control is embodied in the Oscar Pistorius murder trial going on in South Africa right now. Thank to guns, he was able to kill his girlfriend through a closed door. His defence is basically that he mistook his girlfriend for a potentially armed intruder. Irregardless of the outcome of the trial, we may never know for sure whether his claims are truthful or not.
Now take away the gun. Although it would still have been possible for Pistorius to have killed his girlfriend, you can be certain that this was his intent.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
I would also point out that the "US" - commonly condemned in such statistics - is probably the least homogenous country in the world. As such, it's probably useful to look at the state by state rankings, both positively and negatively:
(ranked by deaths per 100k)
1. District of Columbia 30.8 http://www.city-data.com/forum...
-Styopa
Try very hard not to be a minority in the United States. And stay away from Skittles.
In the US, there is very little correlation between gun ownership and murder rate. Many states like New Hampshire and Utah have very liberal (=loose) gun laws and not much murder. Others like Mississippi have loose gun laws and lots of murder; still others like Washington DC have very restrictive gun laws and lots of murder.
I think the best way to go is to stop everyone but the police and the military from carrying guns, just like they do in Mexico.
That's odd, I haven't noticed an increase in local warlords since we implemented similar hand gun laws here in Oz about 25yrs ago. It's definitely a cultural thing, hand guns have never been popular in Oz or the UK. Even when they were legal if you claimed you needed a gun to protect yourself you were seen by "polite society" as a either thug or a coward, probably both. This is also reflected in Australian law since "self defence" is no longer a valid reason to own a gun, "hunting" and "sport" are ok. Under the heading of "sport" you can own a handgun for target shooting, provided you keep it at the range, or submit to "surprise" inspections of your home armoury by the cops.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Canada = 1.4-1.8/100k
U.S. = 4.7-6.6/100k
It's amazing how some people will defend the American way of life while being completely blind to the American way of death.
The US is not a first-world country, nor is it a third-world country. It's a first-world country with pockets of third-world society in it: the inner cities of Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, and the like. Grandparent's odds of being killed, assuming he lives outside of these places, are rather similar to what they would be in Europe. (I used to live in inner-city Baltimore -- not the worst part of the city, but a pretty bad one, the sort where you have to shoo the junkies out of your car so you can use it sometime. Actually, it was my roommate who had to shoo the junkie out of her car. I had to shoo a crackhead out of mine in Washington DC, though.)
Americans, for better or for worse, have come to accept crime in those places. Y'know the horrible Newtown school shooting? That many people get killed every few weeks in Baltimore and it doesn't make the news. The US is a very pluralistic country; we have lots of mini-cultures and mini-societies embedded in it with very different demographics and crime statistics.
So grandparent is probably perfectly fine with his odds, since they're similar to yours.
when said europeans have never lived it.
You do realise there are 27 nations in the EU, dozens of different languages and hundreds if not thousands of provinces, all of whom have been at war with each other for at least the last 2000yrs. Agree the US is far more diverse than most non-American's realise but it's diversity was inherited from Europe, not only via the early settlers, but also the gold rush days, and the two world wars.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The difference is that the ethnic diversity in Europe looks different than it does in the US: in Europe, it's because of immigration. Folks generally don't cross an ocean to then shit on the society they've come to join. Sure enough there's really not that much violence in most immigrant communities in the US. I used to live in the slums of Baltimore, and finally moved to a new apartment in DC. I got to the laundry room and saw a lady in there speaking Spanish to her daughter, and thought "Alrighty, if the immigrants have come here, this is a decent place." I was right.
But the highest crime rate in the US is in the black enclaves in the inner cities. That population was never an immigrant community; it's the descendants of former slaves. We (the American whites) did horrible things to them, and then after emancipation continued to do horrible things to them in part of the country while not really doing enough to facilitate the integration of the liberated slaves and their descendants into society. By the time we passed the Civil Rights Act there were endemic social problems in the US black community, to the point that there's a long and very respectful Department of Labor study into them (the Moynihan Report).
So now in the US those black enclaves have a sky-high murder rate, and the rest of the country has a pretty low one (broadly similar to Europe's). Why? A whole constellation of historical and cultural reasons, many of them traceable back to horrid racism years ago. Should we still blame whitey for the problems? Is it slavery's fault that kids in the ghetto kill each other for silly reasons and don't want to learn to read and write? I dunno.
But saying simply "Europe has diversity too" misses the point: the non-white folks in Europe are there because they came there and wanted to be European, for the most part. (This is pretty similar to Asian-Americans, a group with a low crime rate.) That has vastly different cultural effects than hauling people's ancestors over in chains and wrecking their society.
From an Aussie POV it looks like Americans are paying caviar prices and being served dog food. The Aussie health system has statistically better results that the US system, however a 'single breadwinner" Aussie family of four is paying about one tenth what a similar American family pays for health insurance. To add irony to injury, one tenth of what the US family spends on health is already included in their tax bill and spent on government health schemes.
It's been said that the measure of a nation is found in how it treats it's weakest citizens - the US does rather badly on that score compared to other (modern) western countries.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And yet the simple solutions to these problems are ignored and shunned by americans. "Blacks" kill more people because they are on average poorer, with less access to a quality education and limited access to health care (three of the top 4 items I listed that are different in the USA from the rest of the developed world)
"preventing crime" does NOT mean more cops or more guns, it does not mean more laws, or "tough on crime" legislation, it means getting to the root of the problems and solving those.
So I don't want to be that person, but based on the race and age group that commits the most crimes, you could probably guess the correlation between crime and demographic...
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
It wasn't me who compared the USA to China, Mexico, and Russia, countries with massive social problems, including poverty like you have never seen or experienced.
I wanted to give the USA the benefit of the doubt and compare them to countries with very similar demographics, diversity, and physical characteristics. You decided that was too much to aspire to, and that the USA should be content because it's better then China, Mexico, and Russia. Use whatever terms you want to describe it, but I think you could aim higher.
You talk about diversity, Canada and many parts of Europe are just as diverse as the US, the difference lies in less of an "us vs them" mentality (there are no "african-canadians" "italian-canadians" etc, they're all just Canadian)
You talk about large geography. Canada and Australia both have that covered.
You talk about urban density. Europe has you beat.
You talk about rural areas. Canada and Australia have you beat.
You talk about illegal immigrants from poor nations adjacent. Australia has a huge problem here with boatloads of people trying to sneak in from nearby Asian countries, Much of europe shares borders with countries rife with poverty.
You're making excuses because you don't want to fix your mess.
I have generally found that most foreigners and immigrants have a much harsher perspective on handling crime than Americans. Many developed countries engage in law enforcement activity that Americans would consider the mark of a police state. I've found most of those people, however, find it outrageous that Americans would be so obsessed with perceived freedom that they'd be willing to sacrifice quality of life and overall safety. The difference is that they're focused on prevention whereas American obsess about deterrence via punishment.
I'm not arguing they're right necessarily but it's hard to argue when cities in most first world nations are safer than American cities. I was generally oblivious to this until I lived in Taiwan for several years. It was refreshing to be able to go out at 3am and not have to worry about being mugged. Not that there weren't problems, particularly in Southern Taiwan and especially seedy neighborhoods. And sometimes I suspect crime in other countries in under reported. There's a lot of petty crime that I think is not adequately represented. But even then it's nothing compared to how rough things can get in the US. And to think that Japan somehow manages to be on another level.
Crime also doesn't tell the whole story. In Taiwan, if you really had to go looking for trouble. Otherwise no one gave you a hard time, even as a foreigner. In America, however, wander into certain neighborhoods with the wrong skin color and it's a near inevitability you'll get harassed. And usually the harassment comes from some punk teenager, which is a bit of a concerning trend. Where I used to live in the US was a borderline neighborhood that straddled the line between okay and bad neighborhoods. A week didn't go by that some asshole didn't make remarks about me, as a white guy, being out for a jog.
Inevitably, you learn to avoid trouble areas and I think Americans as a culture do that constantly. The problem is that it's the equivalent to sweeping the problem under the rug. And Americans seem to have a habit of reinterpreting statistics to suit some deluded world view. Take incarceration stats. People look at the numbers and assume there's some grand conspiracy. Doesn't it occur to people that more people are in jail because there's generally more crime? Certainly, the crime statistics corroborate that.
Now, the interesting thing I've found, is that American police departments are far more militaristic than anything I've seen overseas. In Taiwan, more than once I've seen a drunk woman slap a police officer and he just stands there and takes it, waiting for her to calm down. In the US they would have tased her and smashed her face into the pavement, assuming someone more gung ho didn't just pump a few rounds into her claiming probable cause.
On the other hand, I found the authorities there much more comfortable with continued surveillance. Here, it's all reactionary aggression. The rare police car I see is busy blowing through stop lights supposedly on the way to an incident. In Taiwan, however police presence was more persistent and reliable. Not that cops were personable there, but there was a lot more interaction. The only time people ever see cops in America, other than directing traffic, is when something has gone wrong. No wonder people develop a negative impression.
If I had to attribute crime in America with a cause, I think the single largest problem is irresponsible and shit parenting. If that were addressed I think so many other things would start falling into place. There are so many cultural problems endemic to America that you just don't see overseas, at least not to the extent they exist here.
Uh, cherry picking is cherry picking regardless of which cherries are picked. If you want any statistical validity, you have to compare to the entire dataset. Gun ownership, across countries as a whole, is not a great indicator of violence. Norway, for instance, has a pretty fair level of gun ownership, and very low violence rates. When there's a severe lack of correlation, but a large range in the trait you are trying to find a cause for, it appears obvious that one is looking at the wrong factor.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.