LONDON – We live in a time of one of the world’s most profoundest paradoxes- whilst warfare for eight consecutive years has been on a steady downward decrease, individual violence is soaring. Of course, one dramatic event, say nuclear war between India and Pakistan, would make nonsense of the paradox in an instance. Still, for the moment it holds and, given the factors at play, is quite likely to sharpen.
I was provoked into this observation by reading an essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy by two researchers at the Inter-American Development bank, Mayra Buvinic and Andrew Morrison. They show that homicide rates around the world (the most reliable measure of individual violence) increased by more than 50% between 1980-84 and 1990-94. In the industrialized world the increase was 15%. It was up by 80% in Latin America and 112% in the Arab world. However both Asia and the Pacific had declining rates, although in China there was a sharp increase too.
More up to date figures, although not available for every part of the globe, show that the rate of increase in homicides has accelerated, particularly in Latin America and Africa.
There are many reasons for this. The machismo ways of the Latin American male has clearly had something to do with that continent’s high rate. Likewise, it is fair to surmise that Buddhist influence has deterred violence in many parts of Asia. Universally, emotional negligence or physical abuse in early childhood is obviously a crucible for the development of violence in the next generation.
Yet over and above all these influences is the undeniable power of the pressures of demography and its concomitance, the sharp rise in the numbers of young people who are always the ones most tempted by aggression. By the 1980s, after two decades of phenomenally fast growth, in many parts of the Third World more than one fifth of the population was aged 18-24.
Despite this tide peaking nearly two decades ago, homicide rates have not ebbed. Once aggressive behavior is embedded it becomes difficult to quickly root it out. It both transmits itself to the next generation and stays ingrained in the present generation, even as they age. Moreover, often society starts to tolerate more violence than it used to. One can see one vivid example of this with British football violence. Society took it on the chin for too long; it took the authorities the best part of a decade to move to try and control and suppress it.
Population density exaggerates the impact of population growth. The size of many cities has grown exponentially over the last two decades. Even as overall population growth has slowed, the burst of people flooding to the cities shows little sign of abatement. Cities, especially the new upstart parts of them, have few built-in social controls.
It is in these mushrooming cities, moreover, that the number of children born out of wedlock has increased most rapidly, particularly in Africa and Latin America. An unwanted child is an extremely vulnerable creature; the explosion in the numbers of street children now rampant in many parts of the world means that growing up right now are hundreds of thousands who owe little loyalty to the normal constraints of society. Violence could well take another surge forward as they come of age. A recent study in the U.S. argued that increases in abortion rates are associated with declining murder rates. Despite its controversial conclusion it has the ring of truth. Anything that cuts the number of unwanted children- and adoption would undoubtedly be the preferred option- will have a benign effect.
The question begged by today’s charged debate is: has globalization lit the fuse of the bomb that has already been packed? It will take a lot to shake my personal conviction that this present day economic charge is not a good thing. No country in the world has made progress without freer trade and the opening of its economy. Yet there can be no question that it has sharpened disparities of income, even as the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen.
There is an answer to the dilemma. There is no country on earth that cannot afford to do more for their poor. What is needed is a better targeting and use of the money set aside to relieve poverty. Simply to ensure that young girls get educated would make the world of a difference not just to the rate of poverty and population increase, but to the future growth of violence.
The rich countries can do their bit too; they pour water on the flames. Of all the faults of globalization, nothing is worse than the export of violent and prurient images by cinema, video and television to friable societies who have neither the background nor the “sophistication” to separate fact from fiction and whimsicality from actuality. Second, is the drug trade. Culpability is widely spread, but at the end of the day no one is more to blame than the main consuming nations. With their absurd policy of prohibition they have criminalized the selling and buying of drugs beyond all measure. No single act of conscious policy has so increased the rate of crime.
Pity our children. This is their inheritance. Against everything we intended. The remedies stare at us.
