Knife crime - what's happening in the UK?

In my youth in the 60s/70s knives were regularly carried and used. It seems to me though that the knife of choice has changed from the slashing Stanley Knife type to the penetrative blade that does more damage.

Chillkram,
London may be bad, but don't expect other places to be perfect. Knife crime is more prevalent that I would like in my home city of Manchester. Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester also have significant levels of gun crime. When I have looked at murder statistics, they suggest that on the whole, they are fairly steady.
There are other good reasons for moving away from London if you conveniently can do so. Cost of housing and a more relaxed lifestyle are sufficient for me. Don't believe the "dark, satanic mills" image. We're reasonably civilised and you would be welcome.
Ken

My perception is also there are more knives & guns being carried by the yoof,
but more significant is the willingness to use them.

This element of society seems to have had a fundamental shift in attitude to violence & the value of life. Perhaps this is caused by exposure to violent films, TV, video games, etc causing desensitisation. No doubt there's also a major element of gang culture too.

Ken has a good point that it's not just a London problem.

We moved from central south London to Ruislip in 2002 due to similar fears. This was about 18 months after crack appeared in the local estates, & it was really frightening how the area changed.

Ruislip felt safer, but not as safe as we'd hoped. We moved again summer 2007 to a remote rural community, & it's been great. Our only regret is not doing it sooner - sorry for the cliche but it's so true!

Having said that I don't regret taking our time to think things through, & carefully plan our manoeuvres.

Mark,

To answer your question directly, I think this is more than media hysteria, this is a real phenomenon: more and more young men are carrying knives.

In my working life, I sometimes attend the scene of stabbings at the police's blue and white tape, the impromptu shrines, grieving teenagers, police press conferences and the subsequent court appearances of the defendants, statements of the victims' families etc. The common denominator in all these events is the absence of fathers.

I don't believe there are any short term answers to this problem despite the media clamour that 'something must be done'. I think we are living with one of the consequences of family breakdown, where the absence of male role models give young men no clues how to be a man. I realise this is a socially conservative view (small c). In my pragmatic long term view, the more couples stay together, the less young men will stab each other.

I was pleased to hear David Davis MP make the same point on Any Questions on R4 on Friday evening. Depressingly, I also doubt that there is anything governments can do in the long term to keep families together.

Regards, Chris

^^^ Hit the nail on the head IMHO

And the cultural, and sometimes racial, background involved helps to create a culture of acceptance that this kind of behaviour is OK. Both the single parent family structure and the knife carrying.

We moved out to the Worcestershire/Herefordshire borders to a small village where everybody knows everybody else, which makes crime a more difficult option. The village is also very conservative, not very tolerant of youth crime and not frightened to involve the authorities to resolve problems.

We got lucky and I would recommend a similar move to others, job, life balance, etc, permitting.

Jono

Half a century ago these same questions were being asked and Lord John Carmont was thought to hold the answer but would his methods be acceptable today and what is more would they work?

Interesting point Roy.
As Lord John Carmont approach worked in the 1950s I don't see why it wouldn't work now, as long as ...

1: It is done consistently across the UK.

2: No early release schemes due to full prisons.

quote:

Originally posted by Christopher_M:
I think we are living with one of the consequences of family breakdown, where the absence of male role models give young men no clues how to be a man. I realise this is a socially conservative view (small c). In my pragmatic long term view, the more couples stay together, the less young men will stab each other.

I agree with this also. This I think is the root cause.

Amongst other contributary factors are certainly drugs. I have seen youngsters who are so addled with substance abuse that their behaviour is utterly unpredictable and, if they were carrying a knife (which is entirely likely), they would probably not even think before using it. It is best never to challenge people in this state, even if you feel you could physically handle them, because they are so unstable.

This killing of the two French students with over two hundred stab wounds each has all the indications of this type of attacker to my mind.

Mark

quote:

The village is also very conservative, not very tolerant of youth crime and not frightened to involve the authorities to resolve problems. We got lucky and I would recommend a similar move to others, job, life balance, etc, permitting.

Long may it stay that way - if it wasn't for family ties in England then I'd be off tomorrow. I don't think this green and pleasant land is a particularly nice place to live anymore. It has been made so by a generation of thugs - there is really no excuse.

Perhaps some sort of national/community service would be a good idea. Not really sure, just an idea. What I am sure about is victims of crime should be paramount and the scum that carry out crime should receive zero tolerance.

Interesting articles cited in this thread from Noel Gallagher and about Lord John Carmont - I agree with both.

I hope things get better, but with a Government run by a bunch of power-mad immobilises who are only in it for what they can get out of it then I'm not confident it will. I think things started to go wrong in 1979 and, with a brief respite in the late 90s, it has been going downhill ever since.

Oh well - ATB Rotf

The solution to my mind is that the people who carry out violent crime, knife, gun, bullying assaults on the old or infirm should be subjected to very long prison sentences. Long enough to guarantee that even with remission they will be old enough themselves to be past wanting to do such things again.

The question is the political will to build a substantial number of new prisons to keep these people out of circulation for a long time.

The gentle nature of the majority of people has been turned against us. The criminal seems to get far more consideration than the victim. My view is the best place for criminals is "well out of circulation for a very long time."

Also wishing to leave this increasingly topsy-turvy island.

I heard what David Davis said on Any Questions. I still wish he had been chosen as Tory leader. At the time initially it seemed a choice between Ken Clarke and him, but Cameron was chosen without much reason as far as I can see. I am no enthusiast of his ever-so-like-Blair, please-like-me style politics. It will get us nowhere fast ... Mind it could not be worse than what we have now.

George

I voted for Davis in the leadership election, he used to be my MP once upon a time. I've now met "call me Dave" quite a few times, and though he is very likeable I really do cringe at some of the non-sense he comes out with sometimes!

Davis was pretty much spot on on Any Questions, I do think we need to be very careful though, as with anything, that we don't become overzealous. I think the current law in England is quite sensible, permitting a folding, non-locking blade up to three inches in length means that people like me who use a Swiss Army Knife to do just about everything under the sun are free to carry one in our pocket. Like any law it needs to be enforced with a certain degree of common sense. I seriously object to the idea that any knife is automatically a weapon, and some of the persecution of people who have perfectly valid reason for having them strikes me as nuts. I had a friend who it took a year to clear his name who was arrested with a set of kitchen knives he had just bought in their box, in a bag with the receipt. This was in Scotland, to give an idea of just how consistent the law is, when I last went to a dinner at the Scottish Parliament those in Highland Rig handed their sgian dubh over at the security checkpoint went through the metal detector and then were given it back.

My youngest sister currently has braces and cannot eat fresh fruit without cutting it up, when my friends back at school had the same problem their mothers simply included a paring knife in their lunch box, this will not now be tolerated (my parents checked with the school, and even suggested that they deposit a knife into the care of the dinner staff for her to use in the dining hall then return before leaving) so my sister is effectively banned from eating fresh fruit at school. I think this is just plain stupid to be perfectly honest.

Government statistics state that crime is down. Yeah, right. For me, that pretty much confirms that anything we get from them is probably a lie.

Right now, although moving out of the cities is probably just being paranoid, when it comes down to concern for your children I don't think anyone can criticise parental instinct and I have the same thoughts myself sometimes, and we have plans to move from the UK in the coming years altogether. Our friends and family are spread pretty much far and wide now and we are pretty much in the final batch to leave here.

I know it seems simplistic, but police are absent because their motivation is at an all time low from putting in effort to catch criminals that either go free or are sent to a holiday camp for free drugs and a nice time for a few weeks. I think they've largely given up bothering.

I don't really blame the offenders either. I don't think they've been offered an alternative future.

Society has broken down and it isn't the fault of individuals. When TV shows stop glorifying domestic violence (Eastenders), pissed youth falling over in the streets, Big Brother promoting the thought that you can make it by being a piece of shit as long as your face is on the telly, etc etc.

Come to think of it - I blame TV most of all. Making role models out of scumbags - like some footballers. What sort of message is that?

quote:

really do cringe at some of the non-sense he comes out with sometimes

There is only one thing worse than a politician who talks nonsense and that is a politician who does not talk nonsense.

Some of them try to do make a difference and that really worries me. I lived through Thatcher, never again please. Cameron seems OK to me, mostly harmless.

ATB Rotf

Talking to some young people today who were likely to know about such things and they had never heard of it as a problem with the under 18's. This is not the big city tho.

Bring back National Service!!

And the birch if they don't behave!!

These politicians need bringing under control!!

Don't tell Max Mosely

Yeah -from a man who says his parents weren't Nazis!

I haven't nipped out for the papers yet this morning but according to Broadcasting House on R4, the government proposes that offenders will be taken to hospitals to see the consequences of their actions and to prisons to see the lives of those who have been put away for knife crime. [I was slightly sleepy at the time so I don't know if BH were saying this or it was an item reported in one of today's papers].

The intention is that these things will act as a deterrent. To any normal person they would but as an anonymous texter to the programme pointed out, carrying a knife is not normal. In its desperate desire for a short term fix and to be seen to 'do something', the government has failed to get inside the minds of these abnormal young men in my view.

But as I wrote earlier, I think the problem is deeper than this, and I doubt the ability of any government to fix it, much as, like anyone, I hope for better times.

Regards, Chris

I do sometimes wonder if this is a bit of a media perpetuated problem. I remember a R4 programme where they were interviewing knife carrying youths and every single one of them cited self defence as the reason for carrying a knife and one of them even said something along the lines of "well you hear it on the telly and that all the time, that everyone is carrying them and people are getting stabbed, so I thought I'd better get myself one so if someone tries to stab me I got a chance of getting them first". It would seem that fear of people carrying a weapon causes people to carry a weapon, funny that...

quote:

would seem that fear of people carrying a weapon causes people to carry a weapon, funny that...

not all that funny IMHO.

If the messenger blows things out of all proportion, then perhaps it is a good thing to make them reconsider their reporting techniques! The press in the UK has been quite guilty of blowing many things out of all proportion, invading people's privacy under the guise of public interest and simple sensationalism in order to drum up flagging sales.

All that said, what's done is done and now we really do have a serious problem with knife crime (which the statistics appear to indicate has replaced gun crime since the 90s - the number of people hurt or killed by combined gun and knife crimes has remained largely level over that period).

Mapping of weapon crime in London here

interesting that you folks have a knife problem. perhaps you should just be grateful, in contrast to my home town, where a 9 mm. automatic is the teens' weapon of choice. western canada, anyone??