GENEVA, CMC – Jamaica is the only Caribbean country named in The Global Burden of Armed Violence report that covers violent deaths across both conflict and non-conflict environments.
Peter Maurer, State Secretary of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, said the report provides policy-makers and other stakeholders with a timely tool for responding to evidence in designing policies and programmes at the local, national, and regional levels.
The Global Burden of Armed Violence: Lethal Encounters is a product of the Geneva Declaration Secretariat.
The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, endorsed by more than 100 countries, calls upon states to achieve measurable reductions in the global burden of armed violence and tangible improvements in human security by 2015.
The Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011 reveals that El Salvador was the country most affected by lethal violence in 2004–09, followed by Iraq and Jamaica.
It said that Central and Southern Africa, Central America and the Caribbean, and South America are the regions that exhibit the highest levels of lethal violence.
“The boundaries between political, criminal, and interpersonal violence have become increasingly blurred, as revealed in cases of killings associated with drug trafficking in Central America or of pirates engaging in economically-motivated violence in Somalia,’ said Keith Krause, one of the editors and authors of the report.
“This research presets a wider view encompassing deaths from armed violence in all contexts, including crime and gang-related violence, including conflict, and including gender-related violence,” he said.
The report, released late last month, provides a unique integrated approach to understanding the global impact of lethal violence.
As an independent monitoring instrument, it supports the implementation of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development in developing solid and evidence-based answers to the challenges of armed violence.
The report notes that an estimated 526,000 people die violently every year, but only 55,000 of them lose their lives in conflict or as a result of terrorism.
It also finds that 396,000 people, including 66,000 women, are victims of murder, with 54,000 die as a result of so-called ‘unintentional’ homicides or manslaughter, and 21,000 violent deaths occur during law enforcement actions.
The Global Burden of Armed Violence calculates that the average annual violent death rate between 2004 and 2009 was 7.9 per 100,000 population.
At least 58 countries exhibit violent death rates above 10.0 per 100,000, accounting for almost two-thirds of all violent deaths—or 285,000 individuals killed annually.
One-quarter of all violent deaths occur in just 14 countries with average annual violent death rates above 30.0 per 100,000, half of which are in the Americas including Jamaica.
