Homicide, Suicide, and Crime in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon)

May 2010 version

Since the late nineteenth century, government officials have gathered statistics about crime and violence in Sri Lanka. These official statistics have been analyzed with great sophistication by a number of scholars, including:

• Wood, Arthur Lewis (1961) Crime and Aggression in Changing Ceylon: A Sociological Analysis of Homicide, Suicide, and Economic Crime. Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 51: pt. 8.
• Archer, Dane and Rosemary Gartner (1984) Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rogers, John D. (1987) Crime, Justice, and Society in Colonial Sri Lanka. London Studies on South Asia, No. 5. London: Curzon Press. 

The data in the spreadsheets below are compiled from these works or from the United Nations or World Health Organization.

Files

• Homicide rate [doc] in Sri Lanka, 1900-1990, 1995-1997, and in Columbo, Sri Lanka 1900-1973
• Provincial map of Ceylon [jpg] (Wood 1961:10)
• Provincial map of Ceylon [jpg] (Wood 1961:59)
• Provincial map of Ceylon [jpg] (Rogers 1987: 22)
• Homicide rate map of Ceylon [jpg] (Rogers 1987:22)
• Spreadsheet [xls] on Crime and Violence in Sri Lanka
• Spreadsheet [csv] on Crime and Violence in Sri Lanka

[csv] - Some links on this page are to .csv files requiring the use of a database program. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[doc] - Some links on this page are to Microsoft .doc files requiring the use of Microsoft Word. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[jpg] - Some links on this page are to .jpg files requiring the use of an image viewer program. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[xls] - Some links on this page are to Microsoft .xls files requiring the use of Microsoft Excel. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.