BRASILIA – Violent incidents – including accidents and suicides – accounted for 26 percent of adolescent deaths in Brazil in 2010, a nearly fourfold increase since 1980, a study released Wednesday shows.

The Map of Violence Among Children and Adolescents was prepared under the direction of Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, a researcher with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, based on statistics from the Brazilian health and justice ministries.

The 8,686 minors slain in Brazil in 2010 represented 43.3 percent of all murder victims that year. The figure translated into a rate of 13.8 homicides per every 100,000 residents up to the age of 19.

Just over 27 percent of violent teen deaths were the result of traffic accidents, while 19.7 percent were due to suicide or other types of events.

The Map of Violence also compared Brazil with other nations in the Americas.

The study ranked Brazil as the hemisphere’s fourth-most-dangerous country for adolescents, behind only El Salvador, with 18 murders per 100,000 minors; Venezuela, 15.5; and Trinidad and Tobago, with 14.3 homicides for every 100,000 residents 19 and under.

On the positive side, the researchers found that the murder rate among young people in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro declined from 25.9 per 100,000 in 2000 to 17.2 in 2010. EFE