Most homicides, around 60 per cent, are ‘male on male’, often categorised as either ‘confrontational’ or ‘grudge/revenge’ killings. Analysis by the criminologist Dr Fiona Brookman demonstrated how confrontational homicides ‘generally arose from “honour contests” in response to relatively trivial disagreements’. Typically, we are talking about two booze-fuelled lads attempting to knock lumps out of each other over some perceived slight with neither intending, at least at the outset, to kill the other.
I think we get the picture when Dr Brookman writes, ‘The violence tends to occur in more public settings where an audience, often comprising other males, prevails and where alcohol is a characteristic feature of the social context.’ A cocktail of bravado and beer all too often results in another young man’s corpse in the mortuary and another miserable statistic in the official record (See ‘A is for Alcohol’).
As Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi described it in their book
Grudge/revenge killings, on the other hand, are premeditated and purposeful. While the weapon in a confrontational murder is likely to be a fist, a boot or a bottle, in a grudge murder it is likely to have been pre- selected and carried to the scene — a gun, a knife or an iron bar. These homicides are often linked to gangs: a UK study of 10- to 19-year-olds found that 44 per cent of those who said they were in a gang had committed violence and 13 per cent had carried a knife in the previous twelve months. Among non-gang members of the same age the figures were 17 per cent and 4 per cent respectively.
James Gilligan’s studies inside the Massachusetts asylum attempted to unpick the psychological conditions that turn a young man into a cold-eyed gang killer. His conclusion was that for poor and often black American kids on the street, ‘nothing is more shameful than to feel ashamed.’ It is about a loss of self-respect — Gilligan describes it as the opposite of self-pride — which can only be restored through violent retribution.
Gang culture is founded on ideas of status and control. Rival gangs in the UK often ape their US peers and, employing Jamaican vernacular, choose ‘diss’ names for each other — alternative tags designed to disrespect or disparage. Many of the male on male homicides in British inner cities will have their origins in some incident deemed to have displayed impertinence or contempt.
It is time to gather in the library, to review the evidence and attempt to wrap up the case. The murder rate, it can be argued, offers a measure of the health or sickness of a civilised society. Most countries keep official homicide statistics, sometimes stretching back centuries into their past. To academics, such data are like a patient’s records clipped to the end of the hospital bed. Let us trace the line along Britain’s murder chart.
The first and most obvious point is that Britain’s homicide rate is a great deal healthier than it used to be. Back in the Middle Ages, according to analysis of English coroners’ records and ‘eyre rolls’ (accounts of visits by justice officials), the rate was around 35/100,000. This is equivalent to the homicide level in contemporary Colombia or the Congo.
From the middle of the sixteenth century, the homicide rate started to fall steeply, a dramatic reduction in risk that was maintained for two hundred years. Plenty has been written about why the situation improved so radically during this period — the development of a statutory justice system (see ‘J is for Justice’) is often cited — but it was also a period in which the aristocracy and professional class found alternative ways of dealing with dispute and discontent. The duel emerged as a controlled and respectable way of responding to an insult against one’s honour. Spontaneous violence became disreputable for gentlemen of standing, while personal discipline and restraint were seen as the marks of a civilised individual. This was, of course, in contrast to the vulgar and uncultured ways of the lower orders.
The murder rate continued to fall, if less steeply, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as state control and social policies increased. It was also partly a consequence of young men being given a substitute for interpersonal violence to demonstrate their masculinity: organised sport. Boxing, for example, developed from bare-knuckled no-holds-barred brawls to disciplined contests governed by a strict code and overseen by a referee. The Queensbury Rules, introduced into British boxing in 1867, became shorthand for sportsmanship and fair play. Society at all levels increasingly valued the virtue of self-control.
Close study of the vital signs of British society reveal a slight rise in the homicide rate over the past fifty years, but in historical terms the figures are still so low that a single appalling occurrence — a terrorist attack or the murderous activity of a serial killer like Dr Harold Shipman — can skew the data. In international terms, the UK is among the less likely spots to be murdered: our homicide rate is broadly in line with other European nations (a little higher than Germany but slightly lower than France) and roughly a quarter of the level in the United States. Home Office figures for England and Wales published in 2011 show the lowest rate since the early 1990s.
So how to solve this crime? Since the homicide rate is largely driven by the activities of relatively poor, frustrated young men, it is no surprise that this is the group upon which much attention has focused. When the World Health Organization looked at youth violence in Europe they found that 15,000 young people die from interpersonal violence in the region each year. (Britain, incidentally, had one of the lowest death rates for this age group — twenty-seven times lower than Russia and three times lower than Belgium, Ireland or Iceland.) ‘The mass media and society are quick to demonise violent young people,’ their report noted, pointing an accusatory finger at those who inspire juvenile aggression by their abuse or neglect of children and adolescents (see ‘Y is for Youth’). ‘Overall, good evidence indicates that violence among young people can be prevented through the organised efforts of society,’ they said. ‘The evidence base is much stronger for interventions that adopt a public health rather than criminal justice approach, and for those that reduce risk factors and strengthen protective factors among young people early in life than for measures that seek to reduce violent behaviour once it has already emerged.’
We cannot hope to solve all murders: killers are driven by a multitude of motives and inspired by countless causes. But the clues and the evidence add up to suggest that a great many of these tragedies stem from threads of intolerance and indifference that run through the fabric of our society. The true culprit is… all of us.
is for Numbers
When I was at school in the late 1960s, I remember my maths teacher standing proudly behind a very large cardboard box placed upon his desk. Slowly and with reverence, the box was opened and an extraordinary apparatus lifted into view. ‘Boys,’ he began, ‘this is… a calculator.’ A what? The word was new to us, but we instantly fell in love with the shiny, metal contraption — a cross between a giant typewriter and an arcade slot- machine. There was magic in the box of tricks on the teacher’s desk.
My children laugh when I tell them this story. To me, as a youngster, the complexity and scale of mathematical problems were reflected in the complexity and scale of the device needed to solve them. Today, the most challenging calculations can be handled by a puny, mundane slice of plastic.
Technology has transformed our relationship with numbers. Where once we were in thrall to their mystique, we are now blase. Common computer programs allow us to manipulate numerical data with ease: to sort, to rank, to engineer, to plot and to conclude. Statistical analysis used to be the province of the expert mathematical mind; now any fool thinks he can do it. Billions of numbers whizzing at light speed around cyberspace are routinely trapped, dissected and displayed as ‘proof’ of some theory or another. A political researcher with a bit of wit and a laptop can find and manoeuvre the figures to back up the policy idea.
In one sense, technology has democratised data. Statistics are now the potential servants of us all rather than the powerful allies of a few. But one consequence is that we respect them less and distrust them more: familiarity has bred a contempt that risks undermining reason and promoting prejudice. In Britain, a decisive battle has been raging for control of statistics, a clash with profound implications for our governance and our society.
