While the murder rate for young men has almost doubled since 1981, that for women has fallen by more than 10% because of a sharp decline in the numbers being killed by their husbands or partners.

The trend, which was welcomed by women’s groups last week, was detected by a study which looked at the socio- economic backgrounds of all the 13,140 people murdered in Britain in the past 20 years.

Danny Dorling, the report’s author and professor of human geography at Sheffield University, said that marked changes in the social status of women explained the shift.

“The decline in the female murder rate is probably due to women being more likely and able to walk out of violent relationships,” he said.

“People have both became aware of how dangerous domestic violence is and how fruitless it is to stay in a violent relationship. In addition, women have become economically better off and so, in increasing numbers, they can afford to walk out.”

However, Britain’s murder rate for the population as a whole has almost doubled in the past 20 years, with young men from poor backgrounds by far the most likely victims.

Last year Home Office statistics recorded 833 murders in England and Wales, compared with just 565 a decade ago. Of last year’s total, 72% were men.

The study reveals that the five main causes of murder were fights, poisoning, strangling, firearms and cutting by glass or broken bottle.

For women, the numbers killed by strangulation has declined. “The proportion of murders attributable to strangling is falling. This may well reflect the fall in the murder rate of women by men,” the study says.

The study also challenges the notion that “black-on-black” gun crime has led to a disproportionate rise in deaths among the inner-city poor.

In fact, proportionately more murders are committed with guns in well-to-do areas. They account for 29% of murders in the richest parts of the country, compared with only 11% in the poorest wards.

One reason for this is that farmers still have legal access to shotguns. “The more affluent an area, the more likely it is that guns will be used,” said Dorling. Richer, more educated people, he says, also prefer to kill by methods that do not involve physical contact, possibly because they are too squeamish. As Dorling puts it: “For the rich, the brutal methods are going out of fashion.”

Overall, those in the richest 10% of the population were nearly six times less likely to be murdered than the poorest. Those most at risk were 21- year-old men. Their chances of being murdered rose from 31 per million in 1993 to 51 per million by 2000.

The study will be published next month by the Crime and Society Foundation, an independent think tank. It examined all the deaths by homicide in England, Wales and Scotland between 1981 and 2000.

It concludes that the average Briton is 176 times more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery with a single ticket. But there is good news: 99.88% of people are not murdered.

Research: Claire Newell

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