By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 16 June 2025 (IDN) — The world over, most of the public opinion is ignorant of just how much violence has declined over the last 3,000 years. Judging by the historical record, the 21st century, thus far, is the least violent and safest century of all, despite ISIS, despite Israel/Gaza, despite Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, et al, with fewer people being killed in war than ever before.
The murder rate and crime rate are also at their lowest in North America and Europe since the 1960s. Walk the streets of New York, and one will see and feel that the crime rate is half of what it was a decade ago. Western Europe today is the safest place in all human history.
We should go back to Biblical times to see how we’ve changed.
On the way from Egypt to the “promised land” Moses said God was telling him to order his army when they fought the Midianites to kill all the women and children. When Joshua invaded Canaan and sacked Jericho, after the walls came tumbling down, “both man and woman, young and old, were destroyed with the edge of the sword”. Samson established his reputation by killing 30 men during his wedding feast. Then, to avenge the killing of his wife and father, he slaughtered a thousand Philistines. These examples and many more come from the scriptures themselves- the same scriptures that small children in their Sunday schools draw with crayons.
Going further back in history, we have evidence of intense warfare in prehistoric archaeological sites. The hunter-horticulturists who came later were even more violent. It was only when humans began to form states that social rules were enforced, and warfare declined significantly. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the percentage of the world’s population who died from warfare declined from 3% of deaths in the century to 0.7%.
The worldwide rate of violent deaths in this century is a low 6 per 100,000
In this century, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan killed a mere four hundredths of a per cent of the American population. However, the American crime rate has been extraordinarily high until fairly recently. US war deaths in the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq were around 3.7 per 1000 of the US population. Yet, riotous, murderous Detroit in the 1970s and 80s had a homicide rate of 45 per thousand, and the national average was 10 per thousand. (In the last few years, the situation in Detroit has improved a lot.)
According to the World Health Organisation and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the worldwide rate of violent deaths in this century is a low 6 per 100,000 (although Russia, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are much more crime-prone than the average). Muslim countries and China, with their long and continuous civilisations, have a rate even lower.
Until two centuries ago, wealthy people in Europe and the US were more violent than the poor. Gentlemen carried swords and used them with abandon to avenge insults. In the fifteenth century, an astonishing 26% of male aristocrats in Europe died from violence. Now, it is the relatively poor on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder who are the most crime-prone.
Europeans often point their finger at America for its high rates of violence, but most of the northern states, except for Chicago and Detroit, have about the same rate as Europe. It is the South and Washington, DC that have the worst. Southern whites are more violent than northern whites, and southern blacks are more violent than northern blacks.
Blacks have the highest rates of violence due to the legacy of slavery, poverty and discrimination. Southern whites inherited their propensity for violence from settlers from Scotland and Ireland, who, before they emigrated in huge numbers, had lived in the mountains and were barely part of British state structures.
Since the 13th century, murder in most of Western Europe has declined sharply. Records in Britain are good. In the 14th century, there were 110 homicides per 100,000 people in Oxford. In mid-century London in 1950, it had dropped to 1 per 100,000. The growth of big cities reduced violence, despite Charles Dickens’ portrayals.
In South America, a land known for its violence, the homicide rate in its biggest countries, Mexico and Brazil, has gone down since 2000, although it is still higher than the US.
All in all, despite the headlines, the world is becoming a better and less violent place. The next time you switch on the TV news, remember that!
*Jonathan Power has been an international foreign affairs columnist for over 40 years and a columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune (now the New York Times) for 17 years. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright © Jonathan Power
Visit www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
Image: Overall, despite the headlines, the world is becoming a better and less violent place. Credit: Adam Cuerden/Wikimedia Commons
