Rates of homicide in Australia have more than halved since 1990, with gun laws and the pandemic on the list of possible contributing factors.
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has just released its latest statistics on homicide incidents, victims and offenders.
Its report, Homicide in Australia 2020–21, describes 210 homicide incidents recorded by Australian state and territory police in that year, involving 221 victims and 263 identified offenders.
AIC Deputy Director Dr Rick Brown said that since 1989–90, the homicide incident rate in Australia has declined overall by 55 per cent.
“The report shows that in 2020‒21, which included various stages of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns, Australia saw the second lowest homicide incident rate since we began reporting (0.82 per 100,000),” Dr Brown said.
“The female intimate partner homicide rate was 0.25 per 100,000 – the lowest rate since the AIC’s National Homicide Monitoring Program commenced in 1990.
“Ten per cent of homicide victims identified as Indigenous. The report found that the clearance rate for these incidents was the same as it was for homicide incidents involving non-Indigenous victims – 90 per cent at the time of reporting.”
Dr Brown said the National Homicide Monitoring Program has collated data since 1989–90.
The data collected is based on all cases resulting in a person or persons being charged with murder or manslaughter, all murder-suicides classed as murder by police, all driving causing death offences where the offender was charged with murder, manslaughter or equivalent offences, and all other deaths classed as homicides by police, including infanticides, whether or not an offender was apprehended.
