Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Recent historical scholarship suggests that the post-1960 increase in violent crime in most Western societies was preceded by a much longer period of decline. In Britain the incidence of homicide has fallen by a factor of at least ten to one since the thirteenth century and the recent tripling of the rate is small by comparison. Evidence of long-term trends in the United States is obscured by the occurrence of three great surges of violent crime which began ca. 1850, 1900, and 1960. The last two upsurges are largely attributable to sharply rising homicide rates among blacks. A number of other Western societies show evidence of nineteenth-century declines in violent crime. The long-term declining trend evidently is a manifestation of cultural change in Western society, especially the growing sensitization to violence and the development of increased internal and external controls on aggressive behavior. Empirical studies of the correlates of violent crime point toward several general factors which help account for the historically temporary deviations from the downward trend in interpersonal violence: warfare, which evidently tends to legitimate individual violence; the stresses of the initial phases of rapid urbanization and industrialization; economic prosperity and decline; and changes in the demographic structure.