The Economist published a report titled “Dicing with death: The UN offers some hints on how to avoid being bumped off”.
Isn’t this a catchy headline? The Economist is a thoughtful and serious magazine, and including the United Nation in the headline added a global dimension to the terrifying statistics presented in the article, but what were the hints or advice that would help us avoid getting killed?
The first advice is not to live in North or South America or Africa, where murder rates are (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000, respectively) more than four times as high as in the rest of the world. This also means that people in Africa are safer than those in the Americas.
According to the report, Western Europe and East Asia are the safest regions, while the safest countries are Liechtenstein and Singapore, which clocked up just 11 murders in 2012, or one killing per 480,000 people.
Do not go to Honduras, which, says the report, is the world’s most violent country, as one in every 1,100 residents was killed.
The second advice is to be a woman, because the likelihood of a woman being murdered is a quarter of what it is for men.
The report said that nearly half of all female murder victims are killed by their partners or another (usually male) family member.
In Japan and South Korea, just over half of all murder victims are female. Maybe this is because women in these two countries have rights equal to men. Women better be careful about demanding equality, because not all kinds of equality are good.
It is clear that murders take place in the Third World because of poverty, corruption, and bad legislative and judicial systems, but the reasons in developed countries are supposed to be significantly different.
Other studies have found that alcohol featured in half of the murders in Australia, Finland and Sweden, making it a more common factor than any weapon. This means that the bottle used to decorates bars and nightclubs, and which frequently appears in TVs, is a professional killer lurking to strike any time.
Another bad news is that worldwide, only half of the murderers, or more specifically 43 percent, are put behind bars.
This, too, varies hugely. Whereas European police solve eight out of ten murders and those in Asia clear up nearly half, three-quarters of killers in the Americas escape justice. As long as that continues, there is little reason to think that the region’s fearsome murder rate will fall.
Moreover, where are Syria and Iraq in these statistics? Isn’t it a bit strange to neglect the countries with the biggest death rates, which are the results of foolish, sectarian and radical regimes?
Some may say that this report neglected these two countries due to the Iranian-American rapprochement, so I will abstain from commenting. Homicides are a serious issue and the statistics are worrying, and I would rather not be a number included in these statistics.
