I sort of knew this statistic already, but was quite shocked when working out the actual numbers:
Number of murders in the UK: 786
Number of suicides in the UK: 5,706
The proportion of murders which get reported in the media is extremely high compared with nearly all other crimes or forms of death. Many of the reasons for that are understandable, but one risk of giving murders such prominence is that it unbalances public perception of how many people are murdered compared with other crimes or deaths. That in turn effects the issues which politicians speak out about.
Having looked up the figures, I do now wonder whether murder features too often in political speeches and suicide not nearly enough.
Murder figures: 2007-8 figures for Scotland, 2008-9 figures for elsewhere. Suicide figures: 2008.
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12 Comments
This is a game we could play all day; compare the number of British people killed by terrorism and the number killed on the roads, for example, and the comparable amount of parliamentary time spent on each. The only conclusion you can really reach is that the interest of the public in particular issues (which leads to media sales, which leads to more media stories, which leads to political speeches) doesn’t follow actual risk but instead follows a category I’ve just made up, called ‘sexy risk’. Put simply, intentional risk supplied by the ‘other’ and/or unfamiliar risks have a higher sexy factor than mundane risks, even if the latter are significantly more likely to kill you. It’s almost as though a significant chunk of the population have an irrational approach to risk; if they didn’t and we took a comparable approach to every type of risk to that we take to terrorism, private cars would instantly be banned.
I submit that David Kelly muddles these statistics!
To be precise, research has already figured this one out: people don’t judge risks by how likely they are to happen, but rather by how easy it is to call to mind an example of the thing happening, without regard to whether it is a true example. This makes people most worried about risks that regularly appear in complex form in films and TV.
People are not rational. This is something we have proved.
Andrew
Since my immediate response to anyone who tells me that “research has shown” a conclusion I don’t agree with is to ask for the evidence and source, in order to be consistent I should apply the same criterion to you – if only because your hypothesis is so appealing that I shall undoubtedly end up quoting it, and don’t want to be caught out
Ian, I’d recommend reading back through Bruce Schneier’s blog – there are a lot of articles on the psychology of risk, and most of them have links to sources.
Yeah, I picked that one up from Schneier. You probably want to read this essay in particular: The Psychology of Security – it’s a fairly complete (and sourced) summation of everything he’s been saying for the past few years. It discusses a number of ways in which our risk evaluation is irrational. This particular one is called the “availability heuristic”.
The specific research paper in question is “Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgments under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131.”
Without in any way dissenting from the general proposition that people are irrational in general and especially in the calculation of risk, I would point out that there is also a legitimate difference in individual and societal perception of risk. So, if you regard it as society’s (or the government’s) job to keep all its members alive, then it is true that suicide is a much larger problem than murder. However, from my point of view, I can guard relatively easily against death by suicide – and if I don’t, on my own head be it, as it were – but I may need help to guard against death by murder.
It’s like the often repeated statistics on child abuse, showing that children are far more at risk from their own family members than from “stranger danger”. Whilst this is societally true, it’s entirely legitimate and rational for the vast majority of parents to respond “Not for my children it ain’t.” Indeed, the parents who are likely to abuse their own children are probably less likely to be concerned about the risk of others doing so.
Note that this statement is true only if you consider 84% to be a “vast majority” – a plausible but not universal opinion. Around one in six children experiences “serious maltreatment by parents”. While this is a minority, it is still a horrifyingly large one.
The usual statistic quoted is that children are most at risk from “family members and people known to the parents”; the figures are less impressive for family members. Children are about fives times more likely to be sexually abused by strangers than parents; about as likely to be abused by relatives as by strangers; and roughly three times more likely to be abused by people they know than by strangers. Hence, concentrating on strangers is ignoring three quarters of the threat, which is both stupid and negligent.
It’s also worth pointing out that there is a significant number of parents who believe their child is not being abused by relatives, but is wrong in this belief. 75% of all sexually abused children do not tell anybody. 1/3 still haven’t told anybody by age 18.
(Statistics taken from the NSPCC)
Malcolm,
I think the way you present the argument is not the full story – with suicide the individual is both the perpetrator and the direct victim, so logic demands that a consistent argument would urge society not just to guard against being murdered, but also against becoming a murderer (although this is beyond the pale in most ordinary circumstances).
…and therein resides the difference between prevention and curing.
Oranjepan, that only holds if you consider suicide to be murder. Which I don’t, and neither does the law.
Of course, suicide can be (probably usually is) a result of intolerable circumstances or mental illness, which it may be desirable that we seek to protect people from. But that’s a slightly different argument.
Hmm, response to Malcolm:
Death is death – however it is come by. Part of the argument above was that government’s responsibility is to prevent it (ie harm), not that there aren’t different measures of appropriateness for dealing with different types of it.
Therefore the way legislators deal with the general problem must necessarily be comparable, even though the particular laws which cover the particular circumstances of different eventualities must be different.
So I actually think we agree on the fundamental point of addressing mental illness, though government would typically argue it cannot be held responsible for the choices made under the conditions they’ve created despite how these create the percieved and real constraints upon those choices (ie current government is irresponsible).
At this stage I’ll raise home-grown terrorism as an example of counterproductive foreign policy, and say there is a parallel between economic inequality and crime against property, social inequality and destructive personal relationships etc which indicates the deeper roots of murder and suicide reside with incoherent government policy and the negative impact of the wide-ranging failings that arise from that incoherence.
Murder statistics are particularly reliable because it is difficult to conceal a dead body. Press reporting of murders soon after they occur is full of speculation and unfounded assertions. Even high quality broadcasters such as BBC News and Channel 4 News make mistakes. After a recent trial they both reported that the judge had ordered a sentence of 33 years for a murder, which no judge would do knowing that a life sentence is mandatory.
33 years was the minimum period of imprisonment, but viewers should not be left assuming that release would follow. The risk of releasing the prisoner would be assessed by the Parole Board and, if the risk is not acceptable, further imprisonment would follow, with a further review decided by the Parole Board, which is legally constituted as a court.
For someone convicted of manslaughter the judge can pass a life sentence or determine a fixed sentence, such as 17 years. The Mirror got these things right.
Where there have been other offences tried at the same time, such as preventing a lawful burial, and/or perverting the course of justice,a concurrent fixed sentence is appropriate, which might still apply if a prisoner is partially successful on appeal.
For an offence of kidnapping the judge has discretion to award a life sentence or to determine a fixed sentence.
Prison officers will encourage life sentence prisoners to work towards eventual release, which is difficult if the sentence was ‘whole life’.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/becky-watts-trial-nathan-matthews-6824009