Homicides: Italy at European lows. A record built over thirty years, but organised crime has found other ways to express itself

Homicides: Italy at European lows. A record built over thirty years, but organised crime has found other ways to express itself

IN-DEPTH NOTE

Homicides: Italy at European lows. A record built over thirty years, but organised crime has found other ways to express itself

 

Statistics do not always place Italy near the bottom of the rankings. Such is the case with the age-standardised death rate due to homicide, the indicator that the European Union uses to monitor the most extreme manifestation of personal insecurity, within Goal 16 of the 2030 Agenda, devoted to peace, justice and strong institutions. In 2023, the Italian rate stood at 0.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with an EU average of almost 0.7; a value that places our country, together with Germany and Malta, in the group with the lowest homicide mortality in the entire Union. The gap becomes even more evident if the comparison shifts to the countries with the highest values, from 1.1 in Sweden, Estonia and Luxembourg to 1.5 in Lithuania and 1.7 in Latvia.

Age standardisation of the rate disposes of the argument often put forward that the low Italian value simply depends on the country’s demographic structure: with the oldest population in Europe, Italy would have fewer young men, that is, the age group in which both homicide victims and perpetrators are concentrated.

The regional picture makes the result even more striking. Of the twenty Italian territories for which the 2023 Eurostat figure is available, seventeen show a value below the European average (0.65), Abruzzo stands exactly at the average, while only the Aosta Valley (0.68) and Sardinia (0.86) exceed it.

This trend is also confirmed by national statistics, albeit compiled using a different method[1]: according to police data processed by Istat, in 2023 the crude rate of intentional homicides in Italy was 0.57 per 100,000 inhabitants, against a European average of 0.91. This is the lowest value among the 26 EU countries with available data, jointly with Slovenia, and preceded only by Malta.

It is a record that rarely makes the front pages, yet it says a great deal about the country, because it is not a given but the culmination of a profound transformation.

The great reversal of the 1990s

To understand this result we need to look back to a time when Italy was anything but a safe country in this respect. The historical reconstruction published by Istat shows that between 1891 and 1895 there were on average almost 2,000 homicides a year (5.9 per 100,000 inhabitants), whereas in the period 2020-2024 the figure fell to just over 300 cases a year; fewer than 0.6 per 100,000. This long decline, consistent with the secular trend towards a reduction in interpersonal violence that historians document throughout Europe, nevertheless underwent a major reversal between the 1970s and the early 1990s, when common violence was compounded by political violence and, above all, by the escalation of conflicts linked to organised crime. The peak came in 1991, with 1,916 homicides, equal to 3.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, over a third of which, 37.5%, were attributable to mafia-type organisations: between 1985 and 1991 homicides had risen by 992, and 522 of these had been crimes committed by the Mafia, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta.

The weight of the mafia component also emerges over the long term, with 6,681 homicides attributable to mafia-type criminal organisations committed in the period 1983-2018, 95.6% of which were concentrated in Campania, Sicily, Calabria and Puglia. In the five-year period 1988-1992 these crimes came to account for around a third of all homicides committed in Italy, while in the period 2013-2017 their share had fallen to 9.1%. After the peak, the curve reversed with a speed that has few precedents: 1,461 homicides in 1992, 1,065 in 1993, 746 in 2000, down to 327 in 2024, an overall reduction of more than 80%.

The reasons for this reversal are largely well known. The State’s response to the era of the massacres and to the growing offensive of mafia crime between the late 1980s and the early 1990s – culminating in the Capaci and Via D’Amelio bombings – resulted in a far-reaching strengthening of the investigative, judicial and prison tools for combating organised crime. Between 1991 and 1992 the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate, the National Anti-Mafia Directorate and the District Anti-Mafia Directorates were established; the coordination of investigations was strengthened, the protection of cooperating witnesses was regulated, and more incisive rules were introduced on asset-related, procedural and prison matters, up to the special regime provided for by Article 41-bis. These tools undoubtedly increased the State’s repressive and investigative capacity; however, the decline in mafia violence was the result of the interaction between several factors: the arrest of numerous members of mafia leaderships and the growing use of cooperating witnesses on the one hand and, on the other, the waning of internal wars within criminal organisations, together with the gradual change in the strategies of the organisations themselves, which became increasingly reluctant to resort to high-profile violence when this triggered a particularly forceful institutional response. An analysis of homicide mortality in Italy between 1980 and 2014[2] found a significant association between the peak in male homicides in the early 1990s and the degree of mafia penetration of the territories, observing that, precisely in the regions with the highest penetration, rates more than halved and that firearm homicides were those that fell the most.

In other words, Italy has not become a country with low homicide mortality because all forms of violence have disappeared, but because the component that for decades had carried exceptional weight, and that was not found with the same intensity in other European countries, has been drastically scaled back: that of feuds, clashes between criminal groups and the use of firearms in the dynamics of organised crime. The phenomenon is part of the broader crime drop that has affected Western countries since the 1990s, but what sets the Italian case apart is also the intensity of the change: the average age-standardised death rate due to homicide in Italy fell from 0.58 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the three-year period 2013-2015 to 0.40 in 2021-2023, a reduction of around 31%; over the same period the European Union average fell much more slowly, from 0.80 to 0.65, a decrease of around 19%.

North and South: the disappearance of a clear-cut divide

The regional geography of the European indicator holds more than one surprise for anyone expecting to find the traditional divide between the Centre-North and the South. In the standardised Eurostat figure for 2023, the highest value belongs to Sardinia (0.86), followed by the Aosta Valley (0.68), Abruzzo (0.65), the Autonomous Province of Trento and Puglia (both 0.55) and Marche (0.54), while at the bottom of the ranking, alongside Friuli Venezia Giulia (0.11), Umbria (0.19), Bolzano (0.20) and Lombardy (0.25), are Campania (0.20) and Basilicata (0.22). Calabria (0.39) and Sicily (0.38) record lower values than Piedmont (0.43), Emilia Romagna (0.44), Veneto (0.47), Tuscany and Lazio (0.49). Calculating, for purely descriptive purposes, a simple average of the regional values – thus not weighted by population – the North stands at 0.38, the Centre at 0.43 and the South at 0.46; excluding Sardinia, the mainland South and Sicily fall to 0.40, essentially the same level as the northern regions. This picture has changed within a few years, given that in 2018 the North-South divide was still clearly recognisable, with 0.83 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the South against 0.43 in the Centre-North recorded by the Italian law enforcement agencies, although the gap was already narrowing precisely because of the particularly sharp fall in some southern regions. In Calabria, for example, the male homicide rate had fallen from 5.23 per 100,000 men in the three-year period 2010-2012 to 1.95 in 2016-2018, a reduction of 62.8%, far greater than the national average. Convergence, in other words, occurred mainly because the South fell further, a fact that reflects the collapse of mafia violence in the areas where it had historically been concentrated.

That said, the shrinking of the criminal component in homicides does not mean that it has disappeared. In 2024, homicides attributable to organised crime still showed a rate of 0.09 per 100,000 inhabitants in the South, against 0.01 in the Centre and no cases in the North; Campania was the region with the highest rate of male victims, 1.74 per 100,000 men, followed by Molise (1.39) and Sardinia (1.04), and in the South the share of homicides with an unknown perpetrator – often regarded as a sign of the presence of criminal settings – reached 19.8%, against 8.3% in the North. Homicides of women, by contrast, follow a different geography, with the highest concentrations in the Aosta Valley, Sardinia and Marche (Istat data); those occurring within the family, where the vast majority of female victims are concentrated, do not show a clear territorial pattern, but produce regional peaks from year to year that are largely episodic.

We should not, however, give in to the temptation to read the Italian result as a generic certification that Italy is one of the safest countries in Europe. Homicide is the most extreme manifestation of violence, but it does not exhaust the concept of security: Istat’s own historical reconstruction points out that for some forms of predatory crime, such as motor vehicle theft and burglary, Italy continues to show relatively high levels by European comparison. It is also interesting to set the homicide data alongside the data on perceived insecurity collected by Istat, which reveal a weak and non-significant relationship between the two phenomena: territories with few homicides often show high levels of perceived insecurity, and vice versa. Fear of crime, therefore, depends not only on the frequency of its most extreme manifestation, but also on the prevalence of other offences, urban decay, individual vulnerability and the structure of the settings in which people live.

What the decline has not touched

While Italy’s record is noteworthy and largely the result of the scaling back of mafia and criminal violence, it is nonetheless a partial achievement: the reduction has mainly concerned men. The Istat time series shows a collapse in male homicides over the period 1992-2018, from 4 to 0.7 per 100,000, whereas for women the decline was much more modest (from 0.6 to 0.4 per 100,000). In other words, whereas in the early 1990s five men were killed for every woman, today this ratio has fallen to around two to one. Although women still account for a minority of homicide cases, the phenomenon differs from the male one because it takes a specific and by now sadly familiar form: most homicides of women take place in the domestic sphere at the hands of a partner or ex-partner. In 2024, Istat estimated 106 presumed femicides out of 116 homicides with a female victim, and in around 86% of cases the context was that of family or intimate relationships. Contrary to what one might think, the risk is not concentrated among young women but increases with age, peaking among older women aged 75-84, with 0.81 victims per 100,000, often at the hands of partners or relatives. This is a dynamic that does not concern Italy alone: at European level, women are about twice as likely as men to be killed by a partner or family member: 0.4 against 0.2 per 100,000 in 2023. But precisely because the rest of homicide mortality has fallen so much in our country, this component now weighs more heavily on the total, and its limited decline makes much more noise.

For the sake of completeness, it should be said that the female homicide rate also places Italy among the European countries with the lowest values: in 2022, with 0.42 women killed per 100,000, Italy was very close to the lowest value among EU countries with available data[3] (0.39, recorded in Ireland). The problem, therefore, is not that Italian women face a higher risk than other European women, but that their risk has fallen much less than that of men, to the point of becoming a central component of homicide deaths in the country.

A record to consolidate and to read in full

Perhaps the most significant figure is the distance between the Italy of today and that of the early 1990s. The country, which in 1991 experienced one of the most dramatic moments in its recent history in terms of mafia and criminal violence, is today firmly placed in the most favourable part of the European homicide mortality rankings. Regional differences have not disappeared and some components of violence remain strongly territorial, but their scale has changed: even in the regions with the greatest economic and social fragility, the overall homicide death rate can now be very low. Italy’s homicide map no longer automatically coincides with that of poverty, unemployment or economic backwardness, not because these factors are irrelevant to violence, but because over the last thirty years the very composition of violence has changed.

Precisely for this reason, the figure must be read for what it measures and for what it cannot see. A low homicide rate does not equate to the absence of organised crime: mafias evolve, change their modus operandi and replace visible violence with quieter forms of control, based on economic infiltration, corruption and forms of violence that no death certificate records; and this is one of the structural limitations of the European indicator chosen to measure peace and justice.

Furthermore, the overall success must not overshadow the component that resists the decline: violence against women within the closest relationships, which calls for tools different from those that made it possible to curb mafia violence.

The introduction of the offence of femicide with Law No. 181 of 2 December 2025 and the new Article 577-bis of the Criminal Code represent the legal recognition of the specific nature of this form of violence; the first data from the Ministry of the Interior appear positive: in the first half of 2026, female victims of homicide and femicide numbered 34, compared with 54 in the same period of the previous year, a decrease of 37%. It is, however, too early to interpret this as a reversal of the trend, as the data are provisional and refer to a short period; time will tell whether – having drastically reduced the violence of criminal organisations – the country will be able to do the same with the violence that develops within the closest relationships. Giving a crime a name is not enough: tackling it must also start from the ability to detect earlier the signs of control, possessiveness, threats and violence – all factors that unfortunately largely make up a dark figure that is difficult to bring to light – by strengthening prevention, victim protection and action on the cultural and relational dynamics that fuel them.

 

[1] The Eurostat rate is derived from cause-of-death statistics, compiled on the basis of death certificates completed by doctors; it refers to residents and is age-standardised, i.e. related to a European reference population so as to make territories with different demographic structures comparable. The Istat figure, processed from the Ministry of the Interior’s database, instead counts completed intentional homicides recorded by the police forces.

[2] Trends and patterns in homicides in Italy: A 34-year descriptive study, Forensic Science International, February 2020.

[3] Istat, Noi Italia 2025.