摘要：Income inequality has been associated with both homicides and births to adolescents in the United States and with homicides internationally. We found that adolescent birth rates and general homicide rates were closely correlated with each other internationally ( r = 0.95) and within the United States ( r = 0.74) and with inequality internationally and within the United States. These results, coupled with no association with absolute income, suggested that violence and births to adolescents may reflect gender-differentiated responses to low social status and could be reduced by reducing income inequality. Violence and births to adolescents seem to stand out as gender-differentiated markers of the corrosive effects of poverty among young people. 1 – 3 Although adolescent births and levels of violence are strongly associated with poverty within developed countries, national rates of both violence and adolescent births are nevertheless higher in several wealthy countries compared with poor countries. In other words, homicides and adolescent pregnancies appear to be associated with relative rather than absolute poverty. Indeed, the degree of income distribution within a society has been linked to homicide rates within and outside the United States (see, for example, Hsieh and Pugh, 4 Wilkinson et al., 5 Daly et al., 6 and Fajnzylber et al. 7 ), but only within the United States for adolescent births. 8 , 9 We decided to investigate how much these 2 social problems were related to each other and, if they have common roots, whether these roots might lie in relative or in absolute deprivation.
