BLOG: WE DECIDED TO INVESTIGATE AND DIVE INTO MURDER STATISTICS
On May 22, 2020, the PIQUE Magazine, an English-language publication in Canada, wrote in an opinion piece by journalist Andrew Mitchell that “Statistically, men are 17 times more likely than women to murder someone”. However, the author did not provide any links to statistics: there are no illustrations, nor did he offer any further evidence. So, we decided to investigate.
Who kills more in Canada?
First, we decided to check how many men and women are accused of murder in Canada. On the website of Statistics Canada, an agency of the Canadian federal government, we found the number of accused of premeditated murders from 2007 to 2017 by gender. Thus, over 10 years, Canadian women were charged 569 times, and men — 6525. Statistics per 100,000 people over the age of 12. It turns out that men are 11.467 times more likely to kill someone. However, on average for one year, this figure is not higher than 10.
Murders on a global scale
The same situation is with the neighbors of the Canadians — the Americans. Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data, posted similar statistics for 2019. Here the number of men who have committed murder is 7.34 times higher than that of women.
There is also data for the world in general available for 2012. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has published data, according to which, “The global average male homicide rate is, at 9.7 per 100,000, almost four times the global average female rate (2.7 per 100,000 females)”.
Is it safe anywhere?
These chilling statistics prompted us to try and find the safest country in the world, i.e. where the least murders are committed. According to UN, Asia and Oceania are at the bottom of the list, which means they have the lowest rating. However, in Oceania, many states do not have any ranking. Then we reviewed the statistics again. As it turned out, the country with the lowest murder rate is Singapore with only 0.2 murder victims per 100,000 population.
Unfortunately, the author of the claim published in PIQUE did not cite cite any source, so the readers were left to decide for themselves this is true or not. Our research showed that this claim is mostly true, however, the author’s statistics are rather exaggerated.
Indeed, men are much more likely to commit murders than women. However, there are many factors influencing this statistics. The indicators fluctuate in each country in different ways (based on year, age and other indicators), hence such claims always need to have a more detailed specification of data, indicating the year of the statistics.
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RESEARCH | ARTICLE © Konstantin Krestnikov, Nicolai Pershing, Lobachevsky University, RU
