Perhaps many of you will see a statistic in your country on how often a member of a suffers a crime or how often men think about sex. Often they will only say one side of the statistic without a group to compare to. If we someone says that people in red cars only have three hundred accidents in New York city per year, it is important we know how often people in cars of all colors have accidents and how many red cars there are in proportion to other cars. Certainly, one should consider the missing information before taking action such as painting your car red.
A statistic about one group is not significant unless compared with another. There is an appalling statistic that every 30 hours a woman is killed in Argentina. It gives you perspective though when you see that the homicide rate against men is seven times higher than it is in women. There is not something in particular about the way women are seen that makes them targets of murder. Women are severely under-represented in this. So, there is something about the way people see men that make men targets for murder.
Every two or three days there is an ad on t.v. about this clock and after thirty hours someone is killed. There is an easy way to solve this problem: Move to a smaller country. Look at your city, if a woman is murdered every week in your city, that is a lot longer than 30 hours. Feel safer? No?
First thing is first. What is the risk of being murdered in the next year related to? The numbers need to be normalized. Then they need to be compared with other countries.
Now in Argentina the homicide rate is 55 homicides per year per million. In the Americas it is 163! Generally speaking someone leaving Argentina and staying the Americas has double the risk of getting murdered. In the world the statistic is 62 homicides per year per million, and so the rate is somewhat below the average. Can we say Argentina is safer than the world. It was in 2012, when this statistic was taken. One would need to take several annual crime stats, in order to say more than that. If say in 2015 the figures were reversed or came close enough the difference might not be considered significant. There is a big disparity between Argentina and the Americas and I am tempted to say it is much safer in Argentina but again you need to do a several year sample to check for the way these values vary from year to year.
For those who live in the United States, you might be surprised that the homicide rate is lower than that of Argentina. At 47 per million per year. In Canada, there were 16 homicides per year per million, and in Spain there were only 8 homicides per million. Monaco is kind of ideal, with 0 homicides per year, but you probably can't afford to move there.
Sources:
http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/insight-crime-2014-homicide-round-up
http://www.insightcrime.org/images/PDFs/UNODChomicides.pdf
