Making the state more legitimate in the eyes of its citizens, the police more effective and accountable, and promoting the rule of law will be critical to achieve a significant decline of violence
- Manuel Eisner
The University of Cambridge and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have brought together 150 of the world’s foremost scientists and criminologists to set out the first roadmap for reducing global rates of interpersonal violence - a problem that now causes more death and costs more money than all wars combined.
New evidence will be presented at the first Global Violence Reduction Conference in Cambridge this week which shows that homicide rates have been declining since the mid-1990s in many parts of the world - in some cases dramatically.
Nations as diverse as Estonia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Poland, and Russia have seen average recorded homicide rates drop by 40% or more in the course of just 15 years. Out of 88 countries where trend data could be found, 67 showed a decline and only 21 showed an increase between 1995 and 2010, a new analysis of data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has revealed.
The findings are part of an emerging body of evidence - from research into effective policing strategies, rehabilitation methods, better child protection services, and societal attitude shifts - which has many experts agreeing that global rates of violence could be halved by just 2040 if the right policies can be defined and implemented.
International support is growing, with the World Health Assembly issuing a resolution for an action plan on interpersonal violence in May this year. Those gathered in Cambridge call on governments and other stakeholders to lobby for violence prevention and reduction to become a concrete part of the UN’s post-2015 development agenda.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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