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The Common Sense has recently published an extensive comparative research report into attacks on farms and farmers compared to attacks on South Africans more broadly. What follows is a summary of two of the report’s main findings, covering the likelihood of attacks and the likelihood of attacks ending in murder.

The Common Sense measured how much more likely a farm is to be attacked than a house or business elsewhere in the country is to suffer an armed robbery. These armed robberies were chosen because they closely approximate the kinds of attacks that farmers suffer on their homes and businesses. This was called the attack ratio.

The attack ratio was worked out on a per-100 000-household basis, meaning that the figures are directly comparable, and that the fact that there are substantially more non-farming households than farming households does not matter.

Farming households were estimated to be between 1.47 and 2.94 times more likely to suffer an attack than households or businesses in the broader population were to suffer an armed robbery.

The reason for the spread is that there is uncertainty about the exact number of farming households in the country. The larger farming household estimate produced the lower risk figure, while a smaller farming household estimate produced the higher figure. Under the medium assumption about the number of farming households, the attack ratio was 1.96, which would mean that farming households are roughly twice as likely to be attacked as the balance of the population.

The data are set out in the chart below.

The second measure was the attack lethality ratio. This measured the likelihood of an attack ending in murder. Farm attacks were estimated to be 6.7 times more likely to end in murder than armed robberies at homes or businesses in the broader population.

The data are set out in the chart below.

On both accounts, the data were emphatic that farmers in South Africa are significantly more likely to be attacked and murdered in their homes than is the case for the broader population.

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