Child deaths outnumber homicides in the United States, but get far less public attention

It’s a widespread view that child deaths are still a pressing problem in poorer countries, but not in rich ones.

I don’t think this is true, and I want to illustrate it with one example from the United States.

In 2023, 30,200 children died in the US. In the same year, 22,800 Americans of any age were killed through homicide. You can see this in the chart.

Few Americans would argue that murders are a “solved problem”. And this is certainly not what you’d take away from the news. As we showed in a recent article, homicides receive disproportionate coverage in both left- and right-leaning media, relative to the number of people who die from them.

The everyday tragedies of children dying from preterm births, neonatal sepsis, and asphyxia do not get nearly the same attention, but are no less important. These are problems that we can still make more progress on.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Child deaths outnumber homicides in the United States, but get far less public attention” by Hannah Ritchie, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.

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