A Five Year Study of Homicides in Aurangabad, Maharashtra

Introduction: The quality of life in a society is strongly determined by the safety provided to it's members against all forms of violence. "Homicide" which is violence inflicted by one human on another is violence at it's extreme and is an indicator of the social and psychological wellbeing as well as security provided by the social system to the members of the society.

Objectives: To look at the profile of homicide victims in Aurangabad, Maharashtra form 2004 to 2008 A.D.

Materials and Methods: All the cases of homicide recorded in the autopsy centre of government hospital Aurangabad from Jan 2004 to Dec 2008 were taken for the study and retrospectively analyzed using SPSS 15.

Results: There were a total of 163 cases of homicide recorded with 130(79.8%) of them being males. The average homicide rate for the period of five years from 2004 to 2008 AD in Aurangabad was 32.6 per year. In terms of the population base there were 44.34 homicides per 1 million The age category most common was 15-45(69.4%). Among the victims farmers and labourers were the commonest occupations. Religion of the victim or whether they belonged to the urban or rural background did not have any impact on the susceptibility to be victims of homicide in this study. Head injury(57.1%) was found in maximal number of victims as the cause of death and the wound was inflicted by a hard/blunt weapon in majority of victims (65.6%). Burns as a cause of death was seen only in women with dowry as the primary cause.

Conclusion: The commonest victim profile was of a married, male farmer or laborer of no specific religion, either from urban or rural background who had died in a majority of cases due to an injury inflicted only on his head by a hard/blunt weapon. Among women the method of homicide using fire was more likely. The decreasing child gender ratio over the last decade also seems to be a bad indicator for future trends of homicide in Aurangabad.