A spate of stabbing incidents have dominated the headlines in recent weeks. But what are the facts behind knife crime and which young people are in greatest danger?
“Tackling knife culture, especially among young people, is paramount to the safety of our communities, and I am determined to reduce the devastation caused by knife crime,” then Home Secretary Charles Clarke said in the spring of 2006.
Since then there has been a knife amnesty, numerous government initiatives and photo opportunities, with ministers slamming home the same message – that knives will not be tolerated.
But still the deaths caused by knives go on.
According to the British Crime Survey (BCS), overall violent crime has decreased by 41% since a peak in 1995.
Knives are used in about 8% of violent incidents, according to the BCS, a level that has largely remained the same during the past decade.
But the BCS figures do not include under-16s, something which the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced this month would change.
Criminologist Kevin Stenson, from Middlesex University’s Crime and Conflict Research Centre, said the politicians needed to do more to address the problems of those aged under 16 and added: “They are the people who fear being attacked with knives, they carry them because they are scared and for respect. It is about macho status.”
But Ife Igunnubole, a youth worker in Hackney, London, said knives and guns brought a sense of power to youths who felt powerlessness.
He said: “There is a level of desperation on the streets, brought about by poverty, which is creating a culture of fear.”
Mr Igunnubole, who runs mentoring and leadership projects, said tougher sentences and stop-and-search powers were all very well in the short term, but ultimately they were “just scratching the surface” and in the long term there was a need to address issues of poverty and materialism.
Richard Garside, the director of the Centre of Crime and Justice Studies at Kings College London, said: “If you look at the figures for the last 10 years the number of knife victims has remained relatively stable – although there have been spikes – at 200 to 220 a year.
“But there is some evidence the demographic has changed. The average age of homicide victims overall has been going down, with younger and younger victims.”
The falling age of victims is something that has been found with both knife and gun crime.
Mr Garside said: “Those living in poorer parts of town are inevitably most at risk. For many years the murder capital for knife crime has been Glasgow, but now we are seeing it as a major problem in Manchester and London and other cities.”
One Scottish police officer told BBC News: “If you think you’ve got it bad down in London, you should take a look at Glasgow.”
Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, has some frightening statistics when it comes to knife crime.
· Last year there were 73 murders in the Strathclyde Police force area, 40 of which involved knives
· Knife crime levels in Scotland are 3.5 times higher than in England or Wales
· Scotland has a homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000 in the 10-to-29 age group, which compares with one per 100,000 in England and Wales
Karyn McCluskey, head of Strathclyde’s Violence Reduction Unit, said knife crime was endemic and dated back to the “razor gangs” of the 1920s.
She said: “People give all sorts of reasons why they carry knives, including protecting themselves. But a knife is not a weapon of defence, it’s a weapon of offence.”
Ms McCluskey said: “Much of it is to do with bravado. Machismo is a huge issue up here and the lack of role models too. We often get knives being used by grandfathers, fathers and sons.
“Part of the problem is that they don’t have the skills to walk away. If they’re in a taxi queue and it’s raining and they’ve been drinking, if someone looks at them in a funny way there will be a fight. It’s as simple as that.”
She said some offenders mistakenly thought they could stab a rival in the buttocks without harm, but she added: “You can bleed to death if you hit a femoral artery. There is no safe place to stab anybody.”
In the past few years politicians both north and south of the border have steadily increased the penalty for carrying knives, but Richard Garside said there was no evidence tougher sentences act as a deterrent.
“Many of these youths say they are carrying a knife for their own protection, but if they are calculating to commit a serious offence they will not think about the prospect of getting caught,” he said.
No doubt 18-year-old Beatriz Martins-Paes was not thinking about tough sentences when she went out one night in April 2005 armed with a 4in (12cm) kitchen knife.
She is now two years into a life sentence.
The teenager plunged the knife into the chest of 15-year-old Charlotte Polius at a party in Ilford, east London, after over-reacting to a perceived slight.
It is a shame courts are not televised, because the evidence of a Home Office pathologist would have been extremely educational viewing in schools.
Charlotte’s mother wept quietly as Dr Vesna Djurovic described how the blade entered the heart and cut through two major blood vessels, causing huge blood loss.
When asked if the teenager could have been saved by paramedics, she said: “No, I don’t think she had any chance of survival.”
But perhaps even more powerful for a class full of inner-city and streetwise youngsters would have been to witness Martins-Paes when she gave evidence.
“I cannot explain it. It was all unreal. I did not believe it happened. It was just, like, shocking,” she said.
The weapon she used was a simple kitchen knife and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, said on Tuesday: “The knives we are seeing are not nearly as often home-made constructed weapons, as weapons you would take from the kitchen drawer.
“Parents have a duty now to be asking their teenagers: ‘Are you involved in this knife carrying?’”
It may be that the recent spate of knife deaths is simply a spike on a graph – a statistical quirk – but there is no doubt the carrying of knives and guns has not gone out of fashion.
Whether this home secretary, or this government, can turn the tide remains to be seen.
The fatal stabbing of a man yesterday in one of London’s busiest shopping streets in broad daylight has again thrown up headlines about knife crime in Britain.
Boris Johnson, in accepting the office of London mayor, pledged to rid the capital of the “scourge” of knife crime.
Just hours beforehand, 15-year-old Lylle Tulloch had been stabbed to death in stairwell in Southwark, the 12th teenage fatality in London this year. Since then, 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen was murdered in south-east London, and yesterday a young man in his twenties was knifed outside a McDonalds in Oxford Street.
Incidents such as these have fuelled the public perception that knife crime is out of control, yet this is not borne out by the statistics.
According to the British Crime Survey, knife-enabled crime (any crime involving a knife) over the past decade has remained stable at around 6-7% of all crime, comprising 30% of all homicides.
In fact, the most recent crime survey by the Metropolitan police showed that knife crime has actually dropped by 15.7% over the past two years, from 12,122 to 10,220 incidents.
Nevertheless, that still amounts to a knife-related incident every 52 minutes. Knife crimes were also four times more prevalent than gun crimes; and the risk of serious injury was more than double than that for gun crime – statistics that will give the London mayor and his newly appointed knife tsar, Ray Lewis, pause for thought.
Concern over stabbings is not limited to the capital, however. The prevalence of knives on the streets has increased in recent years, according to the Police Federation of England and Wales which will be discussing knife crime and gang violence at the organisation’s annual conference next week.
Knife crime affects young people disproportionately. Statistics show that teenagers in London, particularly those between the ages of 17 and 20, are the most likely to be victims of knife crime, according to the Metropolitan police.
Also notable is the increase in violent crimes committed by 15 and 16-year-olds. According a survey compiled by the Youth Justice Board (YJB), violent offences committed by 16-year-olds rose from 17% in 2004, to 25% in 2005, while those perpetrated by 15-year-olds climbed from 20% in 2004, to 26% in 2005.
Related to this is the increased number of young people arming themselves with knives. The YJB survey reported a 12% increase in the number of teenagers carrying knives since 2002, with the proportion of girls carrying knives rising sharply in recent years, from 15% in 2004 to 21% in 2005.
One in five of those convicted for possessing a knife were aged between 10 and 17 in 2006, according to Home Office statistics.
In their report, the YJB asserted that the increase in children carrying knives was primarily out of fear of bullying or attack, the perception that all their peers carry knives, or to gain “street cred”.
“There is an overlap between teenagers who carry weapons and those who have been victims of knife crime,” Enver Solomon, deputy director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies told the Guardian.
“If someone has been a victim of crime, they might carry a weapon because they feel unsafe. They don’t inherently want to stab someone; it’s just that the knife in the pocket makes them feel secure. The majority of children are carrying pen-knives, not machetes,” he said.
Simply clamping down on the supply of knives – such as the installation of metal detectors at schools or equipping police with mobile metal detectors, as Mayor Johnson recently suggested – is not sufficient to address the problem, he added.
Instead, the mayor should focus on the social conditions in a cluster of boroughs that have generated a disproportionate number of the capital’s knife crimes. Quoting Metropolitan police studies, Solomon said 2% of London wards have been responsible for 10% of all violent crimes involving teenagers.
“If you examine the conditions in these wards, these are areas of high social deprivation, social exclusion and lack of opportunities for young people,” he explained. “The focus should not be on enforcement, but rather on opportunities for kids, through youth support services, peer mentoring schemes and employment opportunities for school-leavers.”
Home Office measures to tackle knife crime have included an amnesty in 2006, which resulted in almost 100,000 knives being handed in, the doubling of the maximum penalty for possession of a knife from two to four years’ imprisonment, giving teachers new powers to search students for weapons, raising the minimum age for knife ownership to 18 and, most recently, imposing a ban on samurai swords.
But focusing on deterrence is inadequate, said Solomon, adding that the key to reducing knife crime was creating a safer environment for youngsters as well as increasing opportunities for young school leavers.
“You have to look at the social drivers. Why do young boys slip into the illegal drugs economy? It’s not a positive choice, but for some of them it seems to be the only choice. You have to use a range of policy levers to tackle this problem.”
Media obsession risks normalising knife crime
The hysteria about knife crime could cause real damage before it fades away, says Frank Furedi
The current media frenzy about a knife-crime epidemic in London, and Gordon Brown’s declaration that 110,000 problem families will be targeted as part of a new crackdown on feral teenagers, signals the arrival of this summer’s high-profile crime.
Public anguish about the flavour-of-the-month crime is a short-lived enthusiasm. Not so long ago it was the epidemic of gun crime that excited the public’s imagination. Before that our attention was absorbed by ‘happy-slapping’, ‘date-rape drug’ and ‘car-jacking’.
In almost every case the attention devoted to the latest crime epidemic was determined by its media publicity value.
Although far too many young people carry weapons and kill and maim one another, nationwide the number of knife victims has been stable for the past decade. The good news is that, compared to most places in the world, youth homicide in Britain is still fairly
rare. The bad news is that the massive publicity devoted to raising awareness of knife crime has the perverse effect of normalising it.
Stories that communicate the idea that, for teenagers, carrying knives has become a fashion statement, can have the effect of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unlike guns or other exotic items, knives are relatively easy to access. The often repeated assertion that many young people do not feel safe unless they carry a weapon may inadvertently give kids the wrong idea. Especially young, easily impressionable pre-teens.
It has certainly encouraged the Government to embrace the really stupid idea of targeting the 110,000 ‘worst’ families in the land.
Knife crime, it seems, is a perfect opportunity for a Government that has far too much free time on its hands. That is why when it is not issuing new parenting orders it will be escorting young thugs to the hospital beds of knife crime victims. Though given the ridicule Gordon Brown has suffered for that idea, it might never see the light of day.
