death among those aged 15–44 years in some countries, and the second leading cause of death in the 10–24 years age group. these figures do not include suicide attempts which are up to 20 times more frequent than suicide. suicide was the 16th leading cause of death worldwide in 2004 and is projected to increase to the 12th in 2030. although suicide rates have traditionally been highest among the male elderly, rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of countries, in both developed and developing countries. interpersonal violence rates and patterns of violent death vary by country and region. in recent years, homicide rates have been highest in developing countries in sub-saharan africa and latin america and the caribbean and lowest in east asia, the western pacific, and some countries in northern africa. studies show a strong, inverse relationship between homicide rates and both economic development and economic equality. poorer countries, especially those with large gaps between the rich and the poor, tend to have higher rates of homicide than wealthier countries. homicide rates differ markedly by age and sex. gender differences are least marked for children. for the 15 to 29 age group, male rates were nearly six times those for female rates; for the remaining age groups, male rates were from two to four times those for females. studies in a number of countries show that, for every homicide among young people age 10 to 24, 20 to 40 other young people receive hospital treatment for a violent injury. forms of violence such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence are highly prevalent. approximately 20% of women and 5–10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25–50% of all children report being physically abused. a who multi-country study found that between 15 and 71% of women reported experiencing physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives. collective violence wars grab headlines, but the individual risk of dying violently in an armed conflict is today relatively low—much lower than the risk of violent death in many countries that are not suffering from an armed conflict. for example, between 1976 and 2008, african americans were victims of 329,825 homicides. although there is a widespread perception that war is the most dangerous form of armed violence in the world, the average person living in a conflict-affected country had a risk of dying violently in the conflict of about 2.0 per 100,000 population between 2004 and 2007. this can be compared to the average world homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people. this illustration highlights the value of accounting for all forms of armed violence rather than an exclusive focus on conflict related violence. certainly, there are huge variations in the risk of dying from armed conflict at the national and subnational level, and the risk of dying violently in a conflict in specific countries remains extremely high. in iraq, for example, the direct conflict death rate for 2004–07 was 65 per 100,000 people per year and, in somalia, 24 per 100,000 people. this rate even reached peaks of 91 per 100,000 in iraq in 2006 and 74 per 100,000 in somalia in 2007. history scientific evidence for warfare has come from settled, sedentary communities. some scholars argue humans may have a predisposition for violence (chimpanzees, also great apes, have been known to kill members of competing groups for resources like food), placing the origins of organized violence prior to modern settled societies. however, actual evidence suggests that organized, large-scale, militaristic, or regular human-on-human violence was absent for the vast majority of the human timeline, and is first documented to have started only relatively recently in the holocene, an epoch that began about 11,700 years ago, probably with the advent of higher population densities due to sedentism. social anthropologist douglas p. fry writes that scholars are divided on the origins of this greater degree of violence—in other words, war-like behavior: there are basically two schools of thought on this issue. one holds that warfare... goes back at least to the time of the first thoroughly modern humans and even before then to the primate ancestors of the hominid lineage. the second positions on the origins of warfare sees war as much less common in the cultural and biological evolution of humans. here, warfare is a latecomer on the cultural horizon, only arising in very specific material circumstances and being quite rare in human history until the development of agriculture in the past 10,000 years. jared diamond in his books guns, germs and steel and the third chimpanzee posits that the rise of large-scale warfare is the result of advances in technology and city-states. for instance, the rise of agriculture provided a significant increase in the number of individuals that a region could sustain over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for development of specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons manufacturers. the percentages of men killed in war in eight tribal societies. (lawrence h. keeley, archeologist, war before civilization) in academia, the idea of the peaceful pre-history and non-violent tribal societies gained popularity with the post-colonial perspective. the trend, starting in archaeology and spreading to anthropology reached its height in the late half of the 20th century. however, some newer research in archaeology and bioarchaeology may provide evidence that violence within and among groups is not a recent phenomenon. according to the book "the bioarchaeology of violence" violence is a behavior that is found throughout human history. lawrence h. keeley at the university of illinois writes in war before civilization that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and that 65% of them were fighting continuously. he writes that the attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize endemic warfare, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. "primitive warfare" of these small groups or tribes was driven by the basic need for sustenance and violent competition. fry explores keeley's argument in depth and counters that such sources erroneously focus on the ethnography of hunters and gatherers in the present, whose culture and values have been infiltrated externally by modern civilization, rather than the actual archaeological record spanning some two million years of human existence. fry determines that all present ethnographically studied tribal societies, "by the very fact of having been described and published by anthropologists, have been irrevocably impacted by history and modern colonial nation states" and that "many have been affected by state societies for at least 5000 years." the relatively peaceful period since world war ii is known as the long peace. the better angels of our nature steven pinker's 2011 book, the better angels of our nature, argued that modern society is less violent than in periods of the past, whether on the short scale of decades or long scale of centuries or millennia. steven pinker argues that by every possible measure, every type of violence has drastically decreased since ancient and medieval times. a few centuries ago, for example, genocide was a standard practice in all kinds of warfare and was so common that historians did not even bother to mention it. cannibalism and slavery have been greatly reduced in the last thousand years, and capital punishment is now banned in many countries. according to pinker, rape, murder, warfare and animal cruelty have all seen drastic declines in the 20th century. pinker's analyses have also been criticized, concerning the statistical question of how to measure violence and whether it is in fact declining. pinker's observation of the decline in interpersonal violence echoes the work of norbert elias, who attributes the decline to a "civilizing process", in which the state's monopolization of violence, the maintenance of socioeconomic interdependencies or "figurations", and the maintenance of behavioural codes in culture all contribute to the development of individual sensibilities, which increase the repugnance of individuals towards violent acts. according to a 2010 study, non-lethal violence, such as assaults or bullying appear to be declining as well. some scholars disagree with the argument that all violence is decreasing arguing that not all types of violent behaviour are lower now than in the past. they suggest that research typically focuses on lethal violence, often looks at homicide rates of death due to warfare, but ignore the less obvious forms of violence. society and culture a sculpture in petah tikva, israel of a padlock on the warped barrel of a semi-automatic pistol, with the inscription "stop violence!" in (hebrew: !די לאלימות) beyond deaths and injuries, highly prevalent forms of violence (such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence) have serious lifelong non-injury health consequences. victims may engage in high-risk behaviours such as alcohol and substance misuse and smoking, which in turn can contribute to cardiovascular disorders, cancers, depression, diabetes and hiv/aids, resulting in premature death. the balances of prevention, mitigation, mediation and exacerbation are complex, and vary with the underpinnings of violence. economic effects in countries with high levels of violence, economic growth can be slowed down, personal and collective security eroded, and social development impeded. families edging out of poverty and investing in schooling their sons and daughters can be ruined through the violent death or severe disability of the main breadwinner. communities can be caught in poverty traps where pervasive violence and deprivation form a vicious circle that stifles economic growth. for societies, meeting the direct costs of health, criminal justice, and social welfare responses to violence diverts many billions of dollars from more constructive societal spending. the much larger indirect costs of violence due to lost productivity and lost investment in education work together to slow economic development, increase socioeconomic inequality, and erode human and social capital. additionally, communities with high level of violence do not provide the level of stability and predictability vital for a prospering business economy. individuals will be less likely to invest money and effort towards growth in such unstable and violent conditions. one of the possible proves might be the study of baten and gust that used "regicide" as measurement unit to approximate the influence of interpersonal violence and depict the influence of high interpersonal violence on economic development and level of investments. the results of the research prove the correlation of the human capital and the interpersonal violence. in 2016, the institute for economics and peace, released the economic value of peace report, which estimates the economic impact of violence and conflict on the global economy, the total economic impact of violence on the world economy in 2015 was estimated to be $13.6 trillion in purchasing power parity terms. religion and politics taliban beating woman in public the st. bartholomew's day massacre of french protestants, 1572 religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history. ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient blood libel against jews, the medieval accusations of casting witchcraft spells against women, and modern accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others. both supporters and opponents of the 21st-century war on terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war. vittorio bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the "minimalist conception" of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the "comprehensive conception" which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs. anti-capitalists say that capitalism is violent, that private property and profit survive only because police violence defends them, and that capitalist economies need war to expand. in this view, capitalism results in a form of structural violence that stems from inequality, environmental damage, and the exploitation of women and people of color. frantz fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the "colonized victims." throughout history, most religions and individuals like mahatma gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. gandhi himself once wrote: "a society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy." modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism. luther seminary old testament scholar terence e. fretheim