Sunday, May 20, 2007

Murder by numbers

My mother watched a programme the other night about a gay couple trying to adopt a child in Guatemala that must have ticked most of her prejudice boxes. She triumphantly announced to me afterwards that the programme makers had described Guatemala as "the most dangerous place in the world".

Last year 5885 people died violently in Guatemala, and 98% of these murders remain 'unsolved'. That makes 19 a day, the highest rate in all Latin America.

But does that make Guatemala City comparably dangerous to cities like Baghdad? Even if the statisticians told me that the murder rate was around 20 a day in both the Iraqi capital and Guatemala City, I know which one of the two environments would feel more dangerous to me personally.

What about of hunter-gatherer communities, many of which have a much higher murder rate than industrial societies, where self-murder is usually higher up the exit list? Outsiders often look upon these 'traditional' ways of life as an approximation to paradise/utopia, yet their violent-death statistics are highly revealing.

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