ABSTRACT
Looked at globally, both the scale and the range of ‘violent crime’ are immense. Estimates based on combinations of criminal justice and public health data place the annual total number of deaths caused by ‘intentional homicide’ (UNODC 2013) or ‘interpersonal violence’ (WHO 2015) at around half a million. Such figures exclude hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by war, civil conflict, terrorism, political oppression and other kinds of collective violence: it is not difficult to find recent examples of, for example, wide-scale military atrocities against civilians or inter-ethnic killings which unquestionably deserve the label of crimes, although large numbers are not officially recorded as such. Of course, the numbers of victims who are seriously injured or psychologically damaged by violence greatly exceeds those killed, and certainly runs into the tens if not hundreds of millions.
