Domestic violence, mainly against women and children, kills far more people than wars and is an often overlooked scourge that costs the world economy more than $8 trillion a year, experts said on Tuesday.

The study, which its authors said was a first attempt to estimate the global costs of violence, urged the United Nations to pay more attention to abuse at home.

"For every civil war battlefield death, roughly nine people . . . are killed in inter-personal disputes," Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University and James Fearon of Stanford University wrote in the report.