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Nine times as many people are killed in disputes between individuals, including incidents of domestic violence, than are killed in wars and conflicts, according to a report which urges global bodies, governments and aid agencies to review approaches to tackling violence.
The cost of all forms of violence amounts to $9.5tn a year, equivalent to more than 11% of world gross domestic product, says Conflict and Violence (pdf), an assessment paper commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.
But "collective violence" – deaths and injuries caused by conflicts and terrorism – accounts for only $167bn of the total figure. Homicides, violent crime, child abuse, domestic violence and sexual violence make up the rest, the report says.
"For each battlefield death in civil war, about nine times as many people are killed in interpersonal disputes," say the authors. They add: "Physical violence in societies is a much larger and more pervasive phenomenon than just civil war violence", and that the economic consequences are much greater.
Between 20 and 25 countries have engaged in conflicts over recent years, causing thousands of deaths and injuries. But in 2008, one in three countries in the world had a homicide rate greater than 10 per 100,000 "which the [World Health Organisation] considers to be an epidemic level".
The report says that 43% of all female homicide victims are killed by a current or former intimate partner, and that 30% of women worldwide are subject to domestic violence during their lifetime – a total of around 769 million. About 290 million children suffer violence in their homes.
The US president, Barack Obama, this week spoke out against domestic violence after American football star Ray Rice had his multi-million dollar contract terminated after video emerged of him apparently knocking his then-fiancee, now wife, Janay Palmer unconscious in a casino lift.
A statement issued by the White House said Obama "believes that domestic violence is contemptible and unacceptable in any civilised society. Hitting a woman is not something a real man does, and that's true whether or not an act of violence happens in the public eye or, all too often, behind closed doors." Every individual had a responsibility to put an end to domestic violence, the statement said.
The report, written by Anke Hoeffler of Oxford university and James Fearon of Stanford university, adjusts and extrapolates US figures on the tangible and intangible costs – including lost potential earnings – of violent crime to arrive at a global figure. "We tried to be conservative," Hoeffler told the Guardian, while conceding that the figures were "ballpark".
The report estimates the global cost of domestic violence against women and children to be more than $8tn a year.
"Domestic abuse of women and children should no longer be regarded as a private matter but a public health concern," says the report. It adds: "The cost of interpersonal violence... are almost wholly neglected in current development programming."
Foreign aid and the development community had focussed on the costs of conflict and large scale collective violence, it said.
"Wars are only one form of violence and are very costly, but other forms are even more costly and don't get as much attention," said Hoeffler. "There has been an over-concentration on the consequences of political violence and not enough on domestic violence. We need to think a lot harder about how we tackle these issues."
Young men were also at very high risk, she added. "Three quarters of all homicide victims are men, and that doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar screen."
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