ABSTRACT
The report on the “Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011” issued by the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development estimated that, between 2004 and 2009, 396 000 people died each year around the world in intentional killings as a result of interpersonal violence, gang violence, or economically motivated crime. A further 55 000 people worldwide died each year as a result of armed conÀ icts, political violence, or terrorism (Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, 2011, p. 43). These ¿ gures are assumed to be conservative estimates, as many countries do not have reliable incidence reporting systems and are likely to under-report violent deaths. The number of fatalities, shocking as it is, represents only the tip of the iceberg as far as the scale of aggression worldwide is concerned. Another global report, the “World Report on Violence and Health” published by the World Health Organization in 2002, presented data on the prevalence of various forms of interpersonal violence, including sexual violence, and violence against children, intimate partners, and elders. It also addressed collective violence between social, ethnic, and national groups (Krug, Dahlberg, Mercy, Zwi, & Lozano, 2002). In his foreword to the report, Nelson Mandela stated:
The twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence. It burdens us with its legacy of mass destruction, of violence inÀ icted on a scale never seen and never possible before in human history . . . a legacy that reproduces itself, as new generations learn from the violence of generations past, as victims learn from victimizers, and as the social conditions that nurture violence are allowed to continue.
