Magnitude, Distribution and Consequences of Violence
Violence in all its forms accounts for over 1.5 million deaths a year, some 90% of which occur in low- and middle-income countries. This total can be broken down into 52% (or 782'000) due to suicide, 35.5% (or 535'000) due to homicide, and just over 12% (182'000) as a direct result of war or some other form of conflict. Thus, most of the deaths due to violence occur in settings which are at peace and most perpetrators are the victims themselves or people who are close to the victim such as parents, intimate partners, friends, and acquaintances.
By way of comparison, the 1.5 millions deaths a year due to violence is greater than the number of deaths due to tuberculosis (1.34 million), road traffic injuries (1.21 million), and malaria (830'000), but slightly less than the number of people who die from HIV/AIDS (1.77 million).
For every death due to violence, there are numerous nonfatal injuries. In 2008, over 16 million cases of non-fatal violence-related injuries were severe enough to require medical attention. Beyond deaths and injuries, forms of violence such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and elder maltreatment have been found to be highly prevalent.
Read more about this topic: Violence
Famous quotes containing the words distribution, consequences and/or violence:
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The horror of Gandhi’s murder lies not in the political motives behind it or in its consequences for Indian policy or for the future of non-violence; the horror lies simply in the fact that any man could look into the face of this extraordinary person and deliberately pull a trigger.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)