Making The Streets Safe For Men by Les May

DONALD Trump introduced us to the world of ‘alternative facts’ or to give them their proper name ‘deliberate lies’. It worked and now a significant proportion of US voters continue to believe he is the legitimate president. But as we are seeing at the moment with the insistence of some Tory apologists that the ‘Test, Track, Trace’ scheme was wondrously good value for money, some people are willing to repeat the same thing over and over again on the assumption that people will start to believe that it is true.

Sometimes it’s not the result of politicians trying to persuade us that results in a public perception that something is true when it isn’t. What we read in the print media or see on TV is the result of selection by journalists of what they think is important enough to make a good story. A murder which figures prominently on our front pages or news headline, especially the murder of an attractive young woman, can by constant repetition, be made to give a distorted picture of reality unless one is careful to look at the data.

According to the Office of National Statistics:

In the 1960s, the proportion of homicide victims was fairly evenly split between males and females. Since then trends in homicide have generally been driven by changes in the number of male rather than female victims. Over the longer term, the number of female victims has tended to fluctuate between 200 and

250 a year from the 1960s. In contrast, the number of male victims increased…

In recent years the number of male victims has fluctuated from an average of 550 between 2001 and 2005, to 323 in 2015, the lowest number for a quarter of a century. Even in that year male victims still made up about two thirds of the total number.

Since 2000 some 40% of all murder victims have been in the age range 16 to 34. Young men made up 80% of victims between the ages of 16 and 24, and 72% between 25 and 34.

In the year ending March 2019, 14% of victims were Black and almost half of these were in the age range 16 to 24. White murder victims made up 71% of the total, 6% were Asian (Indian subcontinent), 4% ‘other’.

The claim sometimes made that our streets are particularly unsafe for women is not supported by the available data. Over the most recent eleven year period 51% of killings of men were by someone not previously known to them compared with 28% of women victims.

Contemplating figures like this is not a pleasant occupation, but it should warn us about the futility of a‘ knee jerk’ reaction to a single well publicised death. A more mature response might be to recognise that directing our efforts towards young men, perhaps especially young Black men, between the ages of 16 and 34 might pay the greatest dividend.

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