15 Interesting Facts About Violence That You've Never Heard Before

Chelsea Wrots
Onedio Member
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Are people naturally violent?  Maybe.. Can we say that animals use violence while killing other animals to survive? Maybe..It's only possible to answer these questions if the idea of violence between the different and same species is clear. As there are many things that we don’t know about violence, there are other facts that we know for sure. Here are the 15 of them:

1. If we talk about purposely hurting others physically, 1.5 billion people die every year, according to the World Health Organization.

2. Even though today's technological world is more convenient for engaging in violence, its known that the number of homicides in the 13th century were 30 times more than today's.

3. If we look at the ratio of deaths to the population, we can see that 2% of the population in 17th century, and 0.7% of the population in 20th century died during wars.

4. The reason why the world seems to have more violence than ever lately is that people have more tendency to develop awareness through different and dangerous things.

And at the same time, we are bombarded with violence by the media.

5. A research done in 2009 shows that the media bombardments about violence do not have any effect on people in terms of getting violent.

6. The experimental psychology expert Steven Pinker says that the reason behind the decreasing number of tendency to violence is the increasing number of educated people. He argues that people are getting smarter and their talent of abstract thinking is improving everyday.

7. But, the talent of abstract thinking can cause us to come up with different types of violence. Animals use violence only to survive, while we humans keep creating numerous concepts such as sadism or terrorism.

8. According to some researchers, our tendency to use violence comes from the fear of death and the need of boosting our self-confidence by using it as a defense mechanism.

9. Violence in the same species, excluding some special ones, only happens when animals get the chance to transfer their genes or when they get into a competition for a partner.

10. According to researchers, the reason why males are involved in more risky and violent situations for a female is that it takes less time and effort for them to have and raise a baby.

11. When we look at the species where the males take more active roles to raise a baby compared to females, such as seahorses and some types of frogs and birds, it is seen that females have more of a tendency to be violent towards each other.

12. For many centuries, researchers have been trying different methods to determine the tendency to be violent. For instance, the 19th century science branch “Phrenology” argued that people's tendency to use violence can be understood from the shape of their skull.

13. It is known that four legged animals rear up in warfare. This made the researchers ask this question: “Did we evolve two-legged because our two-legged ancestors fought better against our four-legged ancestors?”

14. Even though some researchers claim that the pre-agricultural society lived in peace and did not resolve things with violence, the evidence says that murder existed in ancient human history.

15. It’s known that interpersonal violence goes back to the homo species in human evolution. According to some evidence, the oldest known murder dates back to 400,000 years ago.

Who knows, maybe we were one of those rare beings who attacked their own species before we got self-conscious...