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A few times a week I will be copying a chapter out of the Reference Book of Men's Issues for visibility and discussion here. I may make minor changes or additions. There may be new chapters and updates created during this time period.

Every chapter starts with an overview and then follows up with examples and evidence.

Section 2: Life, Death, and Safety

Chapter 3: Homicide, robbery, and physical assault

Overview

Although women are more often the victims of sexual assault (this is also disputable), men are more often the victims of homicide, robbery, and the more injurious types of physical assault. Some dismiss this by noting that men are also more likely to commit these crimes, but a murder victim doesn't receive any solace from his murderer being the same gender as him. (This argument is also often applied to dismiss higher victimization rates among other groups like racial minorities: “that's just blacks killing other blacks, who cares”.)

Examples/evidence

The following table includes numbers on the gender of perpetrators and victims of homicide (using statistics from the United States [1]) and assault (using statistics from Norway on the more serious incidents requiring a visit to an urban accident and emergency department [2]).

Genders Homicide (USA) Assault (Norway)
Male → Male 65.3% 74%
Male → Female 22.7% 21%
Female → Male 9.6% 2%
Female → Female 2.4% 4%

Gender patterns in different types of violence can be seen in the 2008 data from Canada. Women are 1.2× more likely than men to be the victims of common assault, which is the less serious and less injurious form of physical assault. Men on the other hand are more often the victims of assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm (1.9× more likely), aggravated assault (defined as being wounded, maimed, disfigured, or having your life endangered: 3.6× more likely), robbery (1.9× more likely), and homicide or attempted murder (3.5× more likely) [4].

An even bigger disparity is visible in the Chicago Tribune's page documenting victims of shootings in the city. Of the 100 shootings in a one-month period in early 2015 (January 20th to February 16th), 93 had male victims---and the other 7 were listed as "unknown gender" [4].

Some studies look specifically at rates of violence victimization by strangers. In Canada in 2008, men were 80% of all reported attacks by strangers [5]. In the United States in 2010, men were twice as likely to suffer violence from strangers [6].

[1] http://bit.ly/14Scr7r (“Homicide trends in the U.S.” from U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics)

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953603006178 (“Gender and physical violence” by Steen and Hunskaar)

[3] http://bit.ly/1BeU619 (“Gender Differences in Police-reported Violent Crime in Canada, 2008” from Statistics Canada)

[4] https://archive.is/WZvvK (Chicago Tribune page "Chicago shooting victims", last updated 2015/2/19)

[5] https://archive.is/qB16e ("SNAPSHOT: Male Victims of Violent Crime" from National Victims of Crime Awareness Week)

[6] http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvcs9310.pdf ("Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010" from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics)

Updated 2nd source link