The Demographics of Genocide: Who Commits Murder? - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
While interning with Rwanda’s genocide prevention commission, Brehm obtained access to the country’s court records. Those records hold information about who participated in that country’s 1994 genocide, which killed more than one million Tutsis in just a few months. She gathered a few colleagues—assembling the only team in the world with access to this data—and took a couple of years to analyze more than one million Rwandan convictions.
“We were surprised that perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda were, on average, 34 years old,” Brehm says. “Much research in criminology would point toward much younger participants—late adolescence and early twenties—in most any form of crime.”
The team also found that men between the ages of 18 and 45 were responsible for 75 percent of the Rwandan atrocities, representing a demographic slice that does not reflect the age or gender distribution of Rwanda’s larger population. (It’s worth noting that more than 10 percent of Rwanda’s population took part in inflicting the genocide, compared to a 0.0097 percent homicide rate in America in 1994.)
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