By Robert Muggah, co-published with Oxfam.

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A recent survey on perceptions of security in Kenya found that the highest area of concern among household respondents was safety during electioneering periods. Specifically, 48.4 per cent felt most unsafe during political campaigns: an understandable anxiety, given Kenya’s recent political history and its recurrent electoral violence.

Almost one-half of Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence, including forced sexual initiation. Much of the violence is barely acknowledged, let alone investigated and prosecuted. Extreme and even fatal acts of violence—targeting poor women in particular—are common enough to be considered unremarkable, a non-issue for the media, the political class, the police, and by extension, the Kenyan state.

With the majority of the world’s population now living in cities, and with levels of violence very often higher in urban than rural areas, urban armed violence has become increasingly critical to securing human security and safety.

Urban Armed Violence, a Research Note by the Small Arms Survey and the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, surveys the state of research into urban armed violence, and explores some of the main debates on this subject.

Violent deaths make up a substantial proportion of global mortality and morbidity: up to 600,000 occur annually, accounting for around one per cent of global deaths. Among young adult males, deaths from intentional interpersonal violence—homicides—account for over ten per cent of all deaths.

Peace without Security: Violence against Women and Girls in Liberia analyses violence against women and girls (VAWG) in Liberia. First, it examines the extent to which women and girls in Liberia are victims of crimes and violence in general. It then focuses specifically on the patterns and characteristics of sexual and domestic violence. These latter forms of abuse, categorized as genderbased violence (GBV)3 because the victims are targeted on the basis of their gender, mainly affect females.

Karamoja, in the north-east of Uganda and one of the country’s least developed regions, has been plagued by decades-long inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic violence. The availability and use of small arms in the region has exacerbated the violence, and a climate of insecurity has hindered development. Various peace and security initiatives in the region aim to reduce the violence and improve security.

On average, armed violence kills 526,000 people each year.

On average, an estimated 526,000 people died violently each year in 2004–09. This figure includes an estimated  55,000 direct conflict deaths, 396,000 intentional homicides, 54,000 ‘unintentional’ homicides, and 21,000 killings during legal interventions. Far more people died violently in non-conflict settings than were killed in conflicts.

The number of violent deaths is frequently used as a proxy for measuring armed violence, because killings are likely to be recorded more systematically than other crimes.

Rates of femicide—acts of homicide in which the victim is a woman or a girl—are significantly higher in countries and territories affected by high or very high overall homicide rates. With a rate of 12.0 per 100,000 people, El Salvador is the country with the highest femicide rate, followed by Jamaica (10.9), Guatemala (9.7), and South Africa (9.6) (2012).