The rapid growth in knife crime incidents is a tragedy for the victims, their families and UK society. Street crime is nothing new; neither is carrying a knife especially new. Thirty to forty years’ ago carrying a pocket pen-knife was de rigour for most boys. Yet in those days carrying a knife was closely associated with the principles scouting rather than as a weapon of aggression. Somewhere between these decades there seems to have been a massive cultural shift towards aggressive behaviour.
However all that is based on the premise that media reports aren’t sensationalising the issue. The most up-to-date survey by the Metropolitan Police shows knife crime has dropped by 15.7 per cent in the past two years. Something a contradiction to the 17 youths killed in London alone during the first half of 2008. This contradiction is partly due to crime statistics themselves. Official police figures could be distorted to due police processes which don’t register all knife incidents between young people. In contrast the British Crime Survey (otherwise known as the victim study) doesn’t record data from people under 16 or anyone without a postal address. A recent survey by the Youth Justice Board (YJB) would seem to back this discrepancy up, reporting a 12 per cent increase since 2002 in teenagers carrying weapons.
Notwithstanding such statistical fillips along with scope for media exaggeration there are real victims of knife crimes mainly because more young people are carrying knives. Nowhere is this more poignant than in Ben Kinsella’s letter to Gordon Brown, which was sent just weeks before he falling victim to a brutal knife attack.
Ben’s solutions to knife crime were in stark contrast to those propagated by the News of World. Instead longer prison sentences the 16 year-old suggest the Prime Minister introduce parenting classes, curfews and youth clubs as possible solutions. Such an approach stills well with that of Camila Batmanghelidjh. Her organization Kids Company has helped around 12,000 vulnerable children integrate into mainstream society.
Batmanghelidjh’s reasoning is that if you grow up in a dangerous environment where your parents and authorities aren’t protecting you, then the conclusion is that human life is not worthwhile. The message, she says, is “the more violent you are, the more protection you’ll have”. It is hard for many people to appreciate what it’s like to be disenfranchised from mainstream society.
Being in a gang, carrying a knife to protect your patch provides young people with status when there’s not much else to do so you form a subculture. Our society is meritocratic. It’s a culture where to be someone in the world you have a big house, cars, and all the other material provisions money provides. Without money there is no status and for many young people the minimum wage will not provide them with the same status a gang will bring.
Maybe the knife carrying culture has changed over the decades because in the past young people had more opportunities to achieve with genuine apprenticeship schemes, and opportunities to create a life of your own. Now we have just created gangs or subcultures of young people frustrated by the lack of opportunity to enhance their status in acceptable ways.
