New publication by HEUNI on international crime statistics and gender

Published 2.1.2017

HEUNI has released a new web-publication, “Crime and Gender – A study on how men and women are represented in international crime statistics", which is now available online from HEUNI’s website. HEUNI has a long history of working together with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in analysing statistics collected by the UNODC through the dedicated questionnaire known as the Crime Trend Survey (UN-CTS). (For more information, see the selected HEUNI publications linked below.) This new publication is one of the latest endeavors of HEUNI to provide statistical information on the development and current situation of crime, based on the data collected by the UNODC.

The analysis in this publication is specifically focused on gender. It looks at the differences in the number of men and women represented in the criminal justice statistics. The first section presents global crime statistics based on the UN-CTS data. These global rates are shown by different regions and income levels, and where possible, ten-year trends are also presented from 2004 to 2013. The second section focuses on selected crime categories in Europe, using data from the European Sourcebooks of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics (ESB). Based on the two data sources, we present sex-disaggregated rates for the following crime categories; total crime, homicide, rape offences, assault, theft, and fraud. Furthermore, the report includes information on the number of men and women among the police staff globally, and also explores possibilities of using indicators to study attrition, i.e., the trickling out of cases from the criminal justice process.

More information: Markku Heiskanen (markku.heiskanen@om.fi) and Anni Lietonen (anni.lietonen@om.fi)