Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
We must spot and stop hate bubbling in kids
ANY parent reading Ava White’s age would have been left heartbroken. I was.
Twelve years old. A child. Not even into her teens, yet another youngster stabbed to death on Britain’s streets.
Friends who came to leave flowers and cards in Liverpool on Thursday and Friday described her as “bubbly, loving and caring”.
She could have been anyone’s child.
It brought to mind the tragedies of Jamie Bulger and Damilola Taylor more than two decades ago. Jodie Chesney, Ayub Hassan and Jaden Moodie two years ago. And so many of the other children whose lives were snuffed out before they’d had a chance to live them.
What is the world coming to when any set of circumstances involving kids leaves one of their lives taken by the blade of a knife?
How can we stop the hate bubbling in today’s children to such an extent that the most minimal of slights results in death?
And when will this epidemic be brought under control, let alone to an end? No wonder so many of the visitors to Ava’s memorial left so distraught last week.
No parent should ever have to bury their child.
Any parent can empathise with the devastating blow struck to the heart of her family.
According to police reports, she was at a Christmas lights show with her friends on Thursday, when she was assaulted at 8.40pm. Some people will wonder what she was doing out at that time of night.
Who cares? Ava didn’t deserve that. She’s now the 40th young person stabbed to death in this calendar year. If the killings continue at the current rate, 2021 will become the deadliest year for youth knife crime in over a decade. We need action. A plan beyond soundbites and political point scoring.
The sentence for carrying a knife for anyone aged 18 and over is a maximum of four years in jail and an unlimited fine. For those aged 16 or 17 it is a detention and training order of at least four months. But they’d have to have threatened someone with it, or been a repeat offender.
The early warning systems for safeguarding need to be more vigilant. The support networks for schools dealing with problematic children need to be more robust.
Our me-first society has become far too disconnected from the humanity needed to intervene in situations that could keep our kids alive. Somehow we need to restore the sense of community, the conscience that once saw kids argue but live to fight another day.
We can only pray that Ava’s death doesn’t spark more kids into carrying knives for fear of being attacked themselves.
That will only continue the spiral of tragedy and despair.
We’ve become disconnected from humanity needed to keep them alive