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A memorial for murdered South African farmers will take place in Washington DC tomorrow, with the White Cross Project displaying 3 000 white crosses along the National Mall and bringing survivors and bereaved families to the American capital.

The Common Sense has done extensive comparative research into attacks on farms and farmers compared to attacks on South Africans more broadly. A report in this newspaper yesterday showed that farming households are attacked at roughly twice the rate of households in the broader population and that farm attacks are nearly seven times more likely to end in murder than comparable attacks against the broader population.

To provide some sense of global perspective of the danger faced by South Africans broadly, and farmers in particular, The Common Sense’s farm attack research took the further step of developing what is calls the Attack Lethality Index Score, or ALIS. The index can be applied to any population anywhere in the world in order to compare the risk of being violently attacked and killed in homes and businesses. In the case of The Common Sense’s farm attack research, it applied the index across four groups, namely South Africa’s broader population, South African farmers, and the broader populations of the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). This was calculated by combining attack rates with the likelihood of being murdered during an attack.

The index set South Africa’s national score at 100, with all other scores calculated relative to that benchmark. The estimated score for South African farmers was 1 253, compared with 24 for the US and below 1 for the UK.

The data are set out in the chart below.

Throughout the research, The Common Sense adjusted the assumptions underlying its estimates upwards and downwards. Even at the extremes, the broader conclusions remained unchanged. The first is that South Africans, broadly, are much more likely to be attacked and killed in their homes than residents in much of the rest of the world. The second was that South African farming households faced substantially greater danger than South Africans generally. That is the thesis that The Common Sense sought to test, and the exact degree to which it is true is less important than the indisputable fact that it is true to an extreme degree.

Readers seeking a detailed account on the methodology of the analysis can consult the full research report linked here.