Global murder rate rises for first time in a decade

The number of people being murdered has risen for the first time in more than a decade, despite an overall decrease in the number of violent deaths reported worldwide.

The Small Arms Survey report estimates that 385,000 homicides were committed globally in 2016, 8,000 more than the year before. The increase on previous years was driven in part by a marked increase in deaths in non-conflict areas, specifically Venezuela and Jamaica.

Of the five countries with the highest murder rates last year - Syria, El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, and Afghanistan - only two were in the middle of armed conflicts.

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The report noted that while the increase in the homicide rate “does not necessarily indicate a new trend”, but suggested that “it signals growing insecurity in non-conflict areas”.

There was some good news, as the number of people killed as a direct result of armed conflict fell for the third year in a row. The report’s authors, Claire McEvoy and Gergely Hideg, said that more than a million lives could be saved by 2030 if the trend continued.

But since “the uptick in homicides affects far more people’s perceptions of local security than the drop in conflict deaths”, they said, “the overall decrease in violent deaths is unlikely to lead to an increased sense of safety at the global scale”.