Divorce rate linked to higher bloodshed through the occurrence of Homicides based on County by County data, as opposed to the issues relating to unemployment. In four out of five of Phillips’s statistical models, the county divorce rate emerges as a statistically significant predictor of the homicide rate (p < 0.05 in all four models). “On average,” Phillips accordingly observes, “higher levels of the percentage of the population divorced are associated with larger homicide rates within counties over time.”
Lethally Reliable Predictor
Criminologists have long believed that murder rates will climb when the number
of young people grows, especially in areas where unemployment runs high and
urban populations are growing. However, a new study by
Rutgers sociologist Julie A. Phillips suggests that the homicide rate may
track less closely than previously thought with the size of population centers
or with the number or employment status of the young people.
But one all-too-certain portent of murder remains: namely, divorce.
Examining county-by-county data collected between 1970 and 1999, Phillips
uncovers a pattern that contradicts rather than confirms conventional wisdom
among criminologists. In analyses that she calls “intriguing,” Phillips shows
that the statistical relationships between homicide rates on the one hand and
unemployment and population size on the other are both negative, so
manifesting “effects that run contrary to common theoretical expectations.”
As most criminologists would expect, Phillips does discern “a positive
association between the proportion [of] young [in various areas] and homicide
rates within U.S. counties across time.” But Phillips’s
multi-variable analysis establishes that “criminogenic forces, such as poor
social conditions…, can alter the association between the relative size of the
young population and homicide rates.”
One particular social measure especially helps Phillips recognize areas with
the kind of “low social control” that looses murderous
impulses, even if those impulses are “less heavily concentrated in the young
age ranges” in the affected areas than some theorists might have expected.
The indicator of social breakdown that Phillips highlights as a
predictor of murder is the divorce rate.
Unlike elevated unemployment rates and burgeoning population size—both
surprisingly linked to lower homicide rates—high divorce rates do augur
bloodshed. In four out of five of Phillips’s statistical
models, the county divorce rate emerges as a statistically significant
predictor of the homicide rate (p < 0.05 in all four models).
“On average,” Phillips accordingly observes, “higher levels of the
percentage of the population divorced are associated with larger homicide
rates within counties over time.”
County coroners, it appears, will often be called on for grim duties wherever
the divorce courts are busy.
(Source: Julie A. Phillips, “The Relationship Between Age Structure and
Homicide Rates in the United States, 1970 to 1999,” Journal of Research in
Crime and Delinquency 43 [2006]: 230-260.)
