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Homicide rate

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Homicides

About this data

Homicide rate
Homicide rate per 100,000 population of all victims in all age-groups
Source
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2024); Population based on various sources (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 30, 2024
Next expected update
October 2025
Date range
1990–2023

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Homicide data: how sources differ and when to use which one

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Intentional Homicide data are sourced from either criminal justice or public health systems. In the former, data are generated by law enforcement or criminal justice authorities in the process of recording and investigating a crime event, whereas in the latter, data are produced by health authorities certifying the cause of death of an individual.

The criminal justice data was collected from national authorities with the annual United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS). National focal points working in national agencies responsible for statistics on crime and the criminal justice system and nominated by the Permanent Mission to UNODC are responsible for compiling the data from the other relevant agencies before transmitting the UN-CTS to UNODC.

Following the submission, UNODC checks for consistency and coherence with other data sources. The population data used to calculate homicide rates is sourced from the World Population Prospect, Population Division, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

The statistical definition contains three elements that characterize the killing of a person as “intentional homicide”:

  1. The killing of a person by another person (objective element).

  2. The intent of the perpetrator to kill or seriously injure the victim (subjective element).

  3. The unlawfulness of the killing (legal element).

For recording purposes, all killings that meet the criteria listed above are to be considered intentional homicides, irrespective of definitions provided by national legislations or practices. Killings as a result of terrorist activities are also to be classified as a form of intentional homicide.

In several cases data from multiple sources were combined to expand the number of available years within a country’s time series, so that a consistent time series of total homicides back to 1990 could be compiled. Time series adjustments were performed when a country had two sources covering an overlapping time period had similar trends but differening values.

Retrieved on
October 30, 2024
Retrieved from
https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNODC (2024), UNODC Research - Data Portal – Intentional Homicide. https://dataunodc.un.org/dp-intentional-homicide-victims (Accessed on [30 10 2024]).

Our World in Data builds and maintains a long-run dataset on population by country, region, and for the world, based on various sources.

You can find more information on these sources and how our time series is constructed on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Retrieved on
March 31, 2023
Retrieved from
https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Values for the United Kingdom are calcuated by Our World in Data from UNODC data for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Homicide rate”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Fiona Spooner and Max Roser (2013) - “Homicides”. Data adapted from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Various sources. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-unodc [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2024); Population based on various sources (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2024); Population based on various sources (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Homicide rate” [dataset]. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime - Intentional Homicide Victims”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved November 26, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-unodc