The history of homicide
The highest homicide rate since the mid-Victorian period? Some contributors have questioned my assertion yesterday that the UK has a level of murder and manslaughter equivalent to the mid-19th century.
Just to be clear, I was not intending to suggest that murder in Britain had suddenly shot up to levels unseen since Dickens as a result of knife crime in our inner cities. My intention was to offer some historical and global perspective on the issue.
Indeed, I suggested that the most recent data shows a flattening out or even a slight decline in homicide rates in this country.
But the raised eyebrows of some correspondents encourage me to explain further. For 20 years and more, academics have been attempting to offer an historical context for discussions of violence in society.
The problems are manifold. Changes in the intensity of prosecution, in the reporting of crime and in legal structures and the availability (or otherwise) of robust statistics all make the charting of trends in violence extremely tricky.
However, murder and manslaughter offer the best chance of saying something meaningful. Since the Middle Ages, notwithstanding historical changes in the legal system, the significance of unlawful killing has not changed that much.
Studies of medieval or early modern descriptions of the crimes have revealed that the vast majority of cases would still be seen today as culpable homicides and not, for example, as accidents or cases of involuntary manslaughter.
There are also a number of sources (court proceedings, autopsies, coroners' rolls) and since the late 18th to mid-19th Century, most Western states have collected reasonably reliable statistical information on homicides.
With all this data out there, there is broad academic agreement that it is possible to get an idea of the historical trends for murder and manslaughter.
The most recent work I can find was published by Manuel Eisner from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.
If you click this link, you'll be taken to a diagram in Volume 1 of the International Handbook of Violence Research. The graph has a slightly abstract look to it, but the sweeping trend across Western European nations remains clear, I think.
In a paper published earlier this year, there is a table [page 297 of this 2.25Mb PDF] which may be an easier way of seeing the story.
For England, the risk of homicide falls from 1.7 (in the 1840s) to 0.7 (mid-20th Century) and back up again as we approach the present day. The Scottish data is even more pronounced - falling from 2.9 down to 0.7 and then rising to a level equivalent to the mid-19th Century.
Eisner also notes:
An increase in homicide rates over the past 40 years can be observed in all European states (with the exception of Finland). This increase by no means represents a return to the pre-modern frequency of homicide, but it is true that improved medical capabilities and changes in age structure - a lower share of younger age cohorts - tend to mean that the increase is underestimated.
If one looks at the J-shaped curve as a whole, one can see that England's murder rates are back to roughly where they were in the middle-to-late 19th Century, despite our improved ability to save lives and our smaller proportion of population made up young men.
This is a fraught area and one cannot produce perfect statistics to make the point. (Can one ever?) However, I remain convinced that trying to get a bit of historical perspective into the debate is well worth the effort and that, broadly: yes, we have Victorian levels of murder in the UK.
I'm 
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I still think you are wrong. How can any murder rate from the victorian era be accurate. In times when their was such a difference in wealth and equality across the board who's to say that victims in the victorian times were even counted as murders. Or even ever found. Who were the police going to believe. The rich or the poor workers. Cmon use your head. And if anything science doesn't help lower murder rates. If anything helps notify deaths that as murders that would not of been noticed before. Besides how do you save someone today with a crushed skull, severed artery, or brain hermorrage with science. Most die within minutes...
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It's nice to find journalists actually counting for a change. Thanks Mark. However, you need to know that among us historians of crime, opinion is divided about how much trust to place in historical statistics. Some – like Prof Eisner – place a lot of trust in them.
But others say that they are subject to the same kind of doubts that plague modern ones. One historian has even gone so far to say that the number of murder prosecutions in Victorian England was 'capped' at an artificially low level by the Treasury.
If you look at nineteenth century records, you'll find that a large number of incidents which we would prosecute as murder ended up as manslaughter (juries were often reluctant to send killers to the gallows). An even larger number of suspicious deaths were never investigated: especially when the victim was a baby, foreign, or lacked friends. I would take that 1.7 figure with a very large pinch of salt. We've got better medical care, but we also have better forensic science, and unlike in the nineteenth century, we investigate every suspicious death.
Chris A Williams European Centre for the Study of Policing, Open University
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A small point, but a fundamental one; non scientists - and (it seems to me) particularly journalists - consistently refer to 'this data', and tell us 'the data is', or say that 'the has been lost', or say 'this data tells us'.
Wrong. Moreover, if you only have a datum you don't have an accumulation. No accumulation means no valid study has taken place.
So please, tell us about data plural.
This small point is about something big, namely that data are hard fought, the product of reptitions across conditions and subjects. They are what enable us to generalise, whereas a datum does not enable generalisations.
The state of mind (apperception, dare I say?) that underlies recognition of this seemingly small point has implications, big ones. For starters people may stop generalising from the particular, stop calling for instant research, and learn to read the data.
This has been a public service announcement, thank you.
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Regardless of the comparisons, the murder rate is too high because:
1. The police have no powers to deal with issues
2. The politicians are too PC
3. As highlighted by the murderer of Rhys Jones, a life sentence in the UK is NOT life when it should be.
Use a gun in a crime 10 years, shoot one, 20, kill someone life without parole or death by lethal injection!
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My view has long been that the slaughter in the two world wars diminished the capacity of the public to both murder and violence.
Now that affect has passed through the population and these wars are confined to the history books the capability for murder has returned to its original, more human level.
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Mark
Thanks for this. I agree that it's a fascinating but fraught subject.
Eisner's thesis seems to be that it boils down to young men getting aggressive in public spaces (doubtless partly over over personal space and fuelled by cheap alchohol). This is a plausible one and I'd be interested in more comments on this from the professionals. Has the long-run trend of assault among the 18-30 male age group been correlated to the availability and real price of alcohol? The Finnish data might tell a different story...
However, you don't really address one of the points I made earlier - that homicide and violent crime generally) has been falling since about 2000/01 and this year's high homicide figure for young people may turn out to be a statistical blip. At best, it's too early to draw conculsions about this year's figures.
The latest Home Office bulletin Crime in England and Wales 2006/07 says at p.49:
"Violent crime as measured by the BCS has fallen by 41 per cent since a peak in 1995,
representing over half a million fewer victims."
"There were 755 homicides recorded by police in 2006/07, the smallest total for eight
years. There were one per cent fewer homicides than in 2005/06, although the 2005/06 total was increased by the London bombings in July 2005."
755 homicides is 755 too many, but from a population of 60-odd million doesn't seem a high or generally "worrying" figure. Stranger homicide remains very rare in the UK.
And while I hear what you say about the definitions, interpretation and sentencing for murder and manslaughter, I'd still be interested in seeing a statistically sound review of evidence on this. The sources you quote don't seem to address that.
"Homicide" remains a wider and more contextualised term than "murder", and it's important for example that sub-editors don't put headlines about murder to data on homicide (as the BBC website did yesterday).
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The point about the 2 world wars in this time frame is a good point, as we as a public have not seen anything in our time that would reflect the UK/world during the 2nd world war. If anything the 1900-2000 has probably seen more wholesale murder/manslaughter during the time of WW1 and 2 as it was so easly hidden.
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As has been pointed out plus:
1. Forensic and evidence gathering techniques have dramatically reduced the need for police intuition and community liasion/presense. Swapping the prejudice of a nonce round up and 'extracted' confession with science has left an equal defacit in real justice.
2. The police have never been more impotent. This balances the 19th century when police were simply more incompetent.
3. The same people are being murdered. The same sub-classes in society; the vulnerable poor, drug addicts, sex workers, wives, children etc. The times they change, but the modus operandi of your common garden murder do not. Human malignancy and fallability don't change.
4. The number of urban poor has never been as high - except perhaps during the industrial 19th century when everyone flooded to the city to find work as agrarianism died out. Similar situation we have now with rampant immigration and out of control population build up in urban super centers leading to gang warfare and an explosion in organised crime and criminality.
5. Capital punishment and transportation have been removed. So more people are attempting murder, being caught, being institutionalised etc. which is reflected in official statistics. The levels of repeat offending are not - in this sense true crime (as a whole) is far far higher if we go for a per capita proportional representation of the figures.
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My only comment would be the fact that the numbers of murders reduces throughout the war years. Most murders are committed by men against men so it seems logical that there would be less murder during this period.
It looks to me like we have returned to a previous level of murder because that is "normal" for humans. This in turn suggests there are problems in the human condition with which we have never dealt.
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Once again, a debate rages about how extensive the fire is and how we allowed it to start, with little regard to how best to put it out.
There is little doubt that the only meaningful deterrent to crime is the perceived risk in the offender's mind of getting caught. The punishment is largely irrelevant. So, whilst capital punishment gives us a visceral sense of justice it is, in fact, barbaric and pointless.
Arguing about the numbers is management's way of shirking its responsibility to move them in the right direction. Just spend some time working in industry to watch it happen on a daily basis. Has record keeping changed so radically since the 1960s that the trend upward is to be ignored? I think we had a reasonably sophisticated process by the second half of the 20th Century, so now we're only arguing about the gradient of the slope - not the trend.
As someone born in the '60s, I benefitted from a comprehensive education and I grew up with progressive left-wing parents. Now, they, like Keynes before them, have the wisdom to put up their hands and admit their error. They have come to see the folly of laissez-faire parenting and that equality in education by the state meant a huge levelling down in standards. Couple this with Mrs Thatcher's abandonment of community morality in pursuit of individual gratification and you now have a toxic cocktail of rootless, greedy and under-educated people. Nigel Lawson gave the same people access to credit so they didn't have to wait for anything they wanted any more. Deferred gratification is anathema to a great many so-called adults in the UK.
How long might it take for a greedy, under-educated, amoral individual to consider killing another person acceptable in the same way that fleecing them of their money in any one of the dozens of mis-selling scandals was acceptable? Now we have teenage gangsters reared on ultra-violent games spilling out into mainstream society and doing it for real. What moral compass do they follow? What was a giant conceptual leap in uptight 1960 is a much smaller step in 2008.
The answer to this, and a great many other ills in society is both simple and difficult at the same time. We simply have to grow up. Once more of us realise that there is more to human existence than the ceaseless acquisition of things and the concomitant drudgery of work required to fund their purchase we will be able to invest our emotions in other people. This might make us less likely to want to kill them. This recession might be terrible but it might also just be the making of us as we are all forced into sober adulthood.
If we don't grow up, 2007 might not be a blip - it might be where the curve goes geometric.
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So the homicide rate falls from 1.7 to 0.7 and then rises again. Those figures aren't rates of anything. 1.7 per WHAT?
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Is this supposed to be a feel good piece?
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The bulk of murders (60-70%) are supposedly by family members or someone that the victim knows. Certainly that has been the case recently.
Was it so in Victorian times?
Either way, the current "theory" that its all down to drunken yobs, knife carrying and lack of discipline etc would seem to be greatly in error. However, that doesn't make for tabloid headlines, does it.
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The world is becoming more and more egoistic, and things aren’t getting any better. We keep looking for an answer in our egoism, our current situation, and this is pointless. Violence as a method of controlling violence is doomed to fail! W are reading news stories everyday on how punishments are becoming more severe all the time. Violence is simply the stupidest means for correcting society, and only allows more and more dirt to fill it. The only way to save ourselves from any kind of violence is to rise above egoism, period.
http://www.laitman.com/2008/04/more-severe-punishments-wont-make-things-better/
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Sure we have better medical care now, but the chances of receiving that care in time are probably the same as they were then.
I'm not surprised that we're returning to Victorian murder rates, we're returning to Victorian demographics too. rundown of the NHS and Education systems, the increasiing gap between the rich and poor, employment pressures and the rise of Victorian attitudes (certainly amongst employers). Two differences, 1) your social position is no longer determined by class (alone) 2) No capital Punishment. But it should be noted that Capital Punishment couldn't have been much of a deterrent if we are returning to rates achieved when CP was at its height. I would suggest that public perception of policing and the justice system is also returning to a Victorian attitude.
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The problem at the minute is that too many people committing murder are getting away with manslaughter.
In my mind, if you attack someone, and they die as a result, that is murder. If you kill someone through negligence, that is manslaughter.
I remember a story where 2 youths beat a man, set him on fire, pushed sticks up his nose, then threw him in a river to die. They got manslaughter. How this is not murder astounds me.
For example:
- Using a phone in a car, and end up crashing into someone and killing them. That, for me, is the kind of thing manslaughter should be used for.
- Stabbing someone in an attack/ mugging, and they die, is murder.
Then we should have murder one, or an equivolent for pre-meditated murder.
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We are arguing about how murders and suspicious deaths are statiscally recorded.
The point that all of the comments are missing is that the general population feels under siege and threatened.
There is little point saying that crime is at an all time low, when you have reports of crime on TV and newspaper everyday.
Secondly, what has changed a lot in the last 50 years is the amount of gruesome details, now made available to the general public during the course of a criminal nvestigation
This is obviously shocking public opinion.
I and many will agree, that we need to see criminals harshly punished so that the public feels justice is done, whilst being a deterrent.
There is also something that most have ignored so far is that the Police numbers might be up however there is very little sightings of the police in the streets or any neighbourhoods, other than the occasional patrol car, leaving the population feeling under protected.
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Fundamentally it is impossible to carry out a 'perfect murder' these days. Even Beverly Allets use of insulin which is about as clever as it gets was detected because phramaceutical insulin isn't the same as the natural hormone. In victorian times it was very easy to hold a pillow over someones face and say they died in their sleep. It is a safe assumption that many murders were recorded as natural deaths then. You could buy virtually any poison you wished at the chemists and forensics were virtually none existant.
You're not comparing like with like.
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Hilary,
The rates are per 100,000 people - this is the standard measure adopted for homicides and many other crime and social statistics.
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I can't help thinking that out of 'any' group of say one million people ..a certain small percentage are likely to murder someone ....I don't know if laws, punishments, education or wealth have very much to do with it. It's hard to see how we could have made it out of the stone age's if the only thing that prevents us all from killing each other are laws, punishment, education and wealth.
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Mike 14, so you can copy and paste? At least you gave us the link to where you got this.
So while you are looking for the prefect world, what do we do with all these criminals? Wrap them up in cotton wool and say "poor things"? It costs millions to keep criminals locked up - maybe that is why a life sentence in the UK is such a joke and is usually less them 10 with good behaviour? If you commit 1st degree murder, why do you have any right to any life whatsoever?
We really are a useless race of idealists who will eventually destroy oursleves
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With the government more focused on fighting the "fear of crime" (i.e. how do I get people to believe I'm tough on crime, while being super soft on crime) than on giving judges the means to deal with repeat offenders, one can only expect the graph to go up.
And yes, in reply to #21, it's basically the fear of consequences that stops men from just taking what they want from others. Even in stone-age tribes I'm sure there were rules and authority. When you suspend the rule of law what you get is might-makes-right and rioting, like in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
It certainly isn't wealth, education or the "inherent goodness" of man that prevents crime.
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Statistics are used to back any argument. Forget them. What is important. Too many crimes regardless of how those figures compare with the Victorian times. Many argue, sentencing is too light. Prisons are holiday camps, prisoner’s rights, ect. The "system" is too complicated to work efficiently in reducing or preventing crime. Police, judicial and legal systems, prison regulations need to be overhauled. Not modified. Get back to the basics. Too many outside bodies cause the basic requirements to be manipulated to suit the offenders or reduce the ability of the various offices to perform quickly, correctly, but honestly in dealing with crime.
Manslaughter is too easily used to ensure a conviction. Causing death by the use of a weapon is murder. Even the car is a weapon and death caused by drunken/drug addicted or just plain stupid drivers is therefore murder. Often we see that a person’s plea of manslaughter but not murder is accepted to speed up the case and be sure to get a (reduced sentence) conviction. ( a recent report refers to a person convicted of cutting off the ears and murdering a teenager (the judge describing the case as a horrendous crime and the worst he had ever heard) being allowed back into the community after less than 10 years of detention.)
"Life" sentences are a joke. 25 years should be used and never reduced for good behaviour. INCREASED for bad behaviour. Other than the basic "rights" of living, prisoners should not be treated as a “normal living person at home”. Prison is a punishment and should be seen as such. It should be hard (but fair). Luxuries of the outside world should be denied them. Yes, every effort should be made to stop them from further criminal acts. TV in prisons should only be allowed for educational purposes, i.e. trade training, social behaviour training ect.
Prisoners should pay for their upkeep by working for it. Perhaps they could earn some minor personal objects that may teach them, (in a prison environment) that personal effects are precious and they may realise how their victims suffered the effects of crime.“Get the police onto the streets” is another demand by the public. Yes, but get better trained police officers back on the streets. (better trained in attitude to the public). They have a hard job to do and are at times reluctant to do what is really necessary due to the so called “official regulations” that govern their actions against “alleged” offenders. Both parents and children need to learn the meaning of, and act on, RESPECT. That word has almost disappeared from the vocabulary. Government and other authorities need to re-look at their conception of respect in how they manage the country and it population.
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Those interested in the UK homicide rate might read Dr. Joyce Lee Malcolm's book Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002)
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