Challenges and Opportunities in Measuring Violence

Let us imagine a “Harsh World” at one extreme, “the war of all against all” as described by Thomas Hobbes, and a “Gentle World” at the other, where all people communicate nonviolently. Do we live in a “Harsh World”, a “Gentle World” or somewhere between the middle, and to which world are we trending towards? By headlines, it seems that we live in a quite harsh world and it gets harsher every year. But is this impression backed up by data? There is some evidence that a move towards a gentle world has occurred. For example, in the West homicide rates fell dramatically and quite continuously from the late Middle Ages through the middle of the twentieth century. According to Steven Pinker, we may be living in the least violent era our species has seen. However, investigating changes in the rate of violence is methodologically challenging. E.g., the repeat nature of domestic violence makes it hard to measure, especially the experiences of those relatively few people who suffer large numbers of repeat offences. There are also other challenges in the methodology and measurement of violence and its’ change in our societies. Each source of data, including survey and administrative data, has its’ own pros and cons. This session calls for papers mapping the challenges and/or offering opportunities to measure the rate of violence in our societies to be better able to answer to the question “how harsh or gentle our world is and to which world are we trending towards?”