Hi ilmarinen; Re: "Why is it that so few nations have almost all the serial killers on the planet??"
(1) Your statement is wrong. See this complete list:
members.tripod.com
(2) When things happen in the US, it gets lots of publicity. Other nations probably make a big deal of it in the local news, but local news for the US becomes international news for some reason. So the lists of serial killers are very highly biased towards the US. But despite this, the US is not "almost all" of them. We can cancel some of this bias by only looking at the serial killers who made the largest totals.
In particular, note that of the top 10 serial killers in the above list (80 or more victims), the locations listed are South America, US, France, Britain, India, Russia, Mexico and Germany. If you go to the top 20 you add Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Sumatra, Hungary and South Africa.
(3) England has its share. (Including, for instance, Jack the Ripper.)
(4) Germany certainly had its share, at least during WW2.
(5) Little nations like Finland (with a population of 5 million) probably have serial murderers at a rate proportionate to their population. Since Finland is 1/50th the size of US population, you'd expect to have around 1/50th as many. Since there are only 3 or 5 active in the US, that means that something like 9 years out of 10, Finland doesn't have any. So you have to compare European statistics instead.
(6) Other nations' police forces are primitive by American data collecting standards. US serial killers are usually found by very sophisticated analysis of murder patterns, and very expensive evidence collecting procedures. These just aren't available in a lot of places. When the US did improve its police procedures, the number of serial killers discovered (and therefore named) increased. So the rest of the world will likely catch up to our standard eventually.
(7) The primary problem for serial killers (who's activity is against the law all over the planet) is hiding the bodies sufficiently well that they don't immediately get implicated in the murders. Countries that are more rural are undoubtedly better picks for serial killers than countries that are more urban. Jack the Ripper was amazing only in that he was located in the midst of a big city, and he left the bodies out in the open. A far more effective technique would be to transport the victims out to the countryside. It's just harder to do stuff like that in countries which are very crowded, or which have very little private transportation.
But it makes another great thing to wave as an indication of how debauched modern society is.
-- Carl |
