Social media has role in knife crime
ET another knife attack in Huddersfield town centre early yesterday, with the 24-year-old victim fleeing for his life to the police station.
It just gets worse. Hoodlums who stabbed a young woman in London threatened to film her agony and put it on the internet.
Their wickedness brings neatly together two burning issues of the day: knife crime and rampant abuse of so-called social media.
Not content with harming their victim, the thugs wanted to humiliate her with live footage of their street assault.
It is difficult – for me, at any rate – to think of anything more despicable than this outrage.
Knife crime is soaring. In the last recorded year, 40,147 such offences, up 16 per cent. Two out of five fatal assaults are stabbings, 285 in total.
That’s more than three Grenfell Towers, or more than the loss of British service personnel in the Falklands War, a year. Every year. Young people are more likely to die from knife wounds, and black men are at even greater risk.
What’s this got to do with social media? The link, in my view, is a collapse of personal respect for other people, whether friends, relatives or complete strangers.
You can blame police budget cuts, gang violence and drug dealers’ warfare, and these are valid arguments.
But in the end it’s down to social
It only takes a minority to discredit a cultural institution, and that
they are doing.