UN Report Reveals Odds of Being Murdered Country By Country 386
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.'"
Re:Next, be a woman (Score:1, Interesting)
Rape is a horrible, horrible crime. But for all of that, the victim, can live a full and normal life after the fact. A Murder victim, by definition, can not. There are however some good reasons for studying murder rates specifically. Many crimes are reported very differently from one jurisdiction to the next, making comparison extremely difficult, rape is actually very difficult that way because in many of the worst places for it the reporting would show almost no cases due to lack of reportjng, or in some cases lack of an actual crime in that jurisdiction's system of laws. murder is much less prone to this issue. The same problem shows up for "violent crime" some places consider the mere possession of a weapon during a crime to make it "violent" others require the use of the weapon, others require an actual injury, others will only classify one or two specific crimes in the category at all.
Using murder rate as a proxy for violence in general has it's flaws, but it is still quite enlightening to look at.
a fact not mentioned: women kill more men, too (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Singapore (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think you can have a career in drug dealing, then you would indeed be very, very dumb to try that in Singapore. The result is that the city state is visibly suffering far less from drug abuse issues than nearly any other city.
And indeed, neither the government, NOR THE LOCALS, are fond of graffiti. If you want to be an asshole and try it anyway, well you know the risk associated.
And yes, even the locals call it a "fine" city as their are fines for a lot of misdemeanors, yet the fine system did change behaviour. As an amusing example, if I am remembering well, you can have a fine for not flushing in a public toilet. This had an effect, you have to keep in mind the poor uncultivated beginnings of Singapore.
Currently the behaviour of most everyone is changed, nobody even wonders if they should apply basic hygienic procedures.
I agree that whipping is draconian and overkill towards foreigners overstaying their work visum. It is luckily enough of a deterrent to strongly discourage the practice.
In general however it is not at all a fascist police state. I have lived there, I experienced it. I would call the non-democratic government rather a kind of "enlightened despotism", and I (and my fellow expats back then) had to admit that they did a lot of things very, very well indeed.
Interestingly, Singapore in the 1980s was the model for Deng Xiaoping who during a visit noticed how you can have good prosperity and strong government influence together. This is how he started the reforms that made China into the economic powerhouse that it is now.
Re:Singapore (Score:5, Interesting)
> Draconian punishments for even minor offenses will make a place safe, doesn't mean that they are doing it right.
Incarceration rates per 100K
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Singapore: 230
US: 716
Capital punishment:
It was true that a couple of decades ago, they did this a lot (ranked 2nd then). Now they seem to be doing it 5 - 10 times less.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
4 were executed in 2011. None in 2010.
Re:I've made a decision (Score:5, Interesting)
Most men are killed because of who they are - gay men and transgendered people are frequently killed for how they were born. If you can't distinguish the two, and why one is heinously more severe than the other, you fail as a human being.
you take this way too seriously. for example, the un report doesn't count murders perpetrated in the name of "war on terror" (never actually reconned as a war, so those are plain criminal killings wether prosecuted or not) and this omission alone renders the figures meaningless anyway. just an example of many other ways people get killed without making it to the headlines or fancy un statistics. it's just gossip for gutmenschen (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmensch).
that said, how considering killing "because of how" fundamentally more heinous and severe than "because of who" is supposed to make a "better" human out of someone is beyond me.
Drilling down deeper (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:shenanigans (Score:4, Interesting)
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.