Violence & self-harm: injury facts

The figures

Who is most affected

WHO counts 1.25 million deaths a year from violence-related injuries, and puts suicide at more than 720 000 of them. For people aged 5–29 years, 3 of the top 5 causes of death are injuries, and two of those three are homicide and suicide.

Age and sex shape the pattern. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds. Homicide is among the top four causes of death in adolescents, with boys over 80% of both victims and perpetrators, and about four fifths of all homicide deaths worldwide are among men.

Children carry more of this than most people assume. WHO estimates that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence or neglect in the past year.

Where the harm falls

Violence is not evenly spread. WHO reports that 73% of the world's suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries, and that being young, male and of low socioeconomic status raises the risk of being either a victim or a perpetrator of serious physical violence.

WHO describes the risk factors for violence against children at several levels: the individual, the close relationship, the community and the wider society — reaching from a history of exposure to violence and poor parenting practices, through poverty and weak social cohesion, to norms that treat violence as normal and social protection that is absent or inadequate.

Suicide risk is described the same way — as something shaped across a life by social, cultural, biological, psychological and environmental factors. WHO notes that many suicides happen in a moment of crisis, when someone's capacity to deal with a life stress such as money trouble, a relationship breakdown, or chronic pain and illness has broken down.

What prevention means here

Prevention in this field does not mean persuading people to behave better. It means changing the conditions that make violence and self-harm more likely, and making help easy to reach at the moment it is needed. WHO's LIVE LIFE guide for suicide prevention names the interventions it considers proven: restricting access to the means of suicide, working with the media towards responsible reporting, building socio-emotional life skills in adolescents, and identifying, assessing, managing and following up anyone affected by suicidal behaviour — each resting on foundations of situation analysis, multisectoral collaboration, awareness, capacity, financing, and monitoring.

For violence against children, WHO and a group of international agencies publish INSPIRE, a technical package of strategies: implementation and enforcement of laws; norms and values change; safe environments; parent and caregiver support; income and economic strengthening; response services provision; and education and life skills. WHO reports that most of them have been shown to work across several different kinds of violence at once, with gains in mental health, education and crime reduction as well.

Both approaches depend on sectors that do not usually sit in the same room: health, education, labour, justice, policing, social protection and the media.

Counting is part of the problem

WHO is unusually blunt about the state of the data. Only a minority of its Member States have vital registration good enough to estimate suicide rates directly, and stigma — along with the fact that suicidal behaviour is still illegal in some countries — makes under-reporting and misclassification worse for suicide than for most other causes of death.

WHO's own recommendation is better surveillance and monitoring: vital registration of suicide, hospital registries of self-harm, and nationally representative surveys. Until that exists, every figure on this page should be read as the best available estimate rather than a count.

By country

AIHW recorded 3,214 deaths by suicide in Australia in 2023, an average of about 9 a day, at 11.8 deaths per 100,000 population, and close to 24,100 hospitalisations for intentional self-harm in 2023–24. In its injury reporting, AIHW names suicide the leading cause of injury death in 2023–24, at 12 deaths per 100,000 population.

The Office for National Statistics registered 6,190 suicides in England and Wales in 2024, a rate of 11.4 per 100,000 people, with the male rate at 17.6. ONS publishes on a registration basis because a death cannot be registered until the coroner's inquest is complete, and of the suicides registered in 2024 only a minority actually occurred that year — so a registration total is a record of inquests closing, not of a single year's deaths.

India's National Crime Records Bureau recorded 1,70,746 suicides in 2024, slightly fewer than in 2023, at 12.2 per lakh population.

WHO’s estimates for every country, ranked by rate:

• Suicide rate by country
• Homicide rate by country

What prevents it

• Restricting access to the means of suicide. WHO's LIVE LIFE guide lists this among its key interventions.
• Responsible reporting of suicide by the media, which WHO supports with its own resource for media professionals and lists among the LIVE LIFE interventions.
• Building socio-emotional life skills in adolescents, a LIVE LIFE intervention, supported by WHO's Helping Adolescents Thrive toolkit.
• Early identification, assessment, management and follow-up of anyone affected by suicidal behaviour — a LIVE LIFE intervention, and a module in WHO's mental health intervention guide for front-line health workers.
• A comprehensive national suicide prevention strategy. WHO notes that only a few countries have made suicide prevention a health priority and that few report having such a strategy at all.
• Laws that protect children, including bans on violent discipline and limits on access to alcohol and firearms — the opening strategy in WHO's INSPIRE package.
• Parent and caregiver support, and income and economic strengthening for families. WHO lists both as INSPIRE strategies with measured preventive effect on violence against children.
• Response and support services, so that a child exposed to violence can reach emergency care and psychosocial support — the R in WHO's INSPIRE package.

How to read these numbers

• Every figure on this page comes from a WHO fact sheet, and each fact sheet carries its own date and its own reference year. WHO's suicide fact sheet is dated 28 August 2026, its violence against children fact sheet 7 May 2026, and its injuries and violence fact sheet 19 June 2024.
• Deaths by suicide are under-counted almost everywhere. WHO says so directly: stigma, legal status and weak vital registration make misclassification a bigger problem for suicide than for most causes of death, so the real number is higher than the published one.
• The violence against children estimate is a past-year prevalence figure drawn from surveys, not a count of reported cases. WHO presents it as an upper bound.
• WHO estimates and national statistics are built differently and will not match: national crime figures count offences recorded by police, while WHO counts deaths in the global health estimates. And this page carries no case detail and does not describe how anyone died — WHO's own reporting guidance is that such detail carries risk and adds nothing a reader needs.

The observances that campaign on this

Sources cited on this page

1. World Health Organization — Injuries and violence (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
2. World Health Organization — Suicide (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
3. World Health Organization — Violence against children (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
4. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — Suicide & self-harm monitoring: Summary — www.aihw.gov.au, read 29 September 2026.
5. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — Injury in Australia: Summary — www.aihw.gov.au, read 29 September 2026.
6. Office for National Statistics — Suicides in England and Wales: 1981 to 2024 — www.ons.gov.uk, read 29 September 2026.
7. National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2024: Snapshots — www.ncrb.gov.in, read 29 September 2026.