Body count - Definition

There is also a musical group called Body Count.

Body count refers to the total number of people killed in a particular event.

In the 2nd US Gulf War, the US military adopted an official policy of not counting civilian deaths. This claim to be making no attempt to calculate the numbers of noncombatant casualties of war was actually a refusal to release these numbers to the public, based on the knowledge that civilian casualty figures are 'bad publicity,' since the military does gather such figures for a variety of reasons (estimating efficiency of new and old weapons systems, planning operations, etc.). In response, several independent groups of researchers attempted to gather and tally credible accounts of civilian deaths. Most widely circulated were probably the Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.net) project, and a survey by the Johns Hopkings Bloomberg School of Public Health (http://www.jhsph.edu/PublicHealthNews/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html) that estimated 100,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war.

In censorship, "Body count" has been used as a criterion to judge the 'shock value' of a movie, and hence its suitability for younger viewers. It is usually calculated by the number of deaths or bodies shown on-screen. This has led some directors to imply deaths instead of showing them, for example showing a group of unarmed people facing a villain, then cutting to the villian firing a gun and grinning. The victims bodies are never shown, but the viewer will understand that they were brutally murdered.

This article or section should be merged with Body Count

For the more interested people "Body Count" has been a musical group in the middle nineties playing very popular "cross over" music. The singer and front man of "Body Count" was the hip hop singer Ice-T who wasn't allowed to "Rap" while playing with the other guys of "Body Count".

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