Record number of stabbings plague UK
Youth violence is a ‘cancer,’ PM May says
Prime Minister May calls surge in knife crimes public health emergency
LONDON – A boy, 7, threatens to knife a pregnant school teacher. Two high school students from opposite ends of the country, both 17, die in violent stabbings hours apart. A 45year-old woman’s spinal cord is severed, leaving her paralyzed.
Knife-related homicides took 285 lives in England and Wales from March 2017 to March 2018 – a record since data collection began in 1946. The data from the Office for National Statistics don’t include Northern Ireland and Scotland.
Unlike the USA, where guns are tied to many deaths, only 4% of homicides here last year were from shootings; 39% were from “sharp instruments,” the top weapon.
Police leaders, youth workers and victims’ families called for action over what Prime Minister Theresa May described as a public health emergency and a “cancer” affecting British society: violence by its youth.
The “pervasive horror of knife crime” must end, said Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, in his Easter message.
“It’s getting worse, and I don’t believe we’ve reached the peak,” said Caroline Shearer, whose son Jay was fatally stabbed in 2012 at age 17.
Shearer runs Only Cowards Carry, an organization that teaches schoolchildren about the grim physical realities of knife crime, from organ failure to macabre forensics, as part of an effort to prevent others from dying in similar circumstances.
“I was quite naive before my son was murdered. I believed that stabbings only occurred if drugs or gangs were involved,” she said. Jay was killed by a vegetable knife at a private party. He was celebrating his exam results.
Campaigners and academics have different explanations for what has caused the increase in knife crime when, official data show, violent crime in Britain overall has fallen by about a quarter since 2013.
Some point to fewer police on the streets, although May insisted there is “no direct correlation” between a fall in police numbers and rising knife crime.
“We cannot simply arrest ourselves out of this problem,” Britain’s leader said this month during a summit on youth violence.
The number of incidents recorded by police on Britain’s streets involving knives or sharp instruments increased to 40,829 last year, a rise of 6%.
At least 40 people have been fatally stabbed in Britain in 2019. They came from all kinds of backgrounds, and at least 10 were teenagers, although the majority of homicide victims were from the 18- to 24-year-old group. Males are most affected.
Jodie Chesney was an enthusiastic Explorer Scout. Yousef Makki wanted to be a surgeon. The two 17-year-olds were stabbed to death on the same weekend in different parts of England.
The youngest victim, Jaden Moodie, 14, was pushed off a scooter and stabbed to death. Police said it was a targeted attack.
“This kind of phenomenon often seems to want to avoid being pinned down to cause and effect” said David Wilson, a criminologist at England’s Birmingham City University. “What’s clear is that lots of young men, in disproportionate numbers to what we’ve previously experienced, are being attacked, wounded and, in many cases, killed.”
Stephen Addison, a former gang member and the founder of BoxUp Crime, an organization that works with inner city kids to combat youth crime and violence through boxing training, said he believes the real problem is Britain has a generation of young people who “don’t have purpose, who haven’t connected to purpose.”
“When you haven’t connected to purpose, your time becomes limitless, and you do things without a concept of time, you make mistakes without a concept of time, you make decisions without a concept of time. A lot of kids are selling drugs, going to prison, coming out, stabbing people, going back to jail – all without a concept of time,” said Addison, 28, who is exploring bringing BoxUp Crime to Los Angeles and New York City.
“The second young people connect with purpose, their time becomes limited. Then they start thinking: ‘OK, I’ve only got a certain amount of time to do this, to box and make it to the Olympics or to set up a business.’ We need to give these kids a sense of purpose.”
Addison turned his life around – found his purpose – at age 20 after he had a dream he was going to go to prison for murder. “I am lucky to be doing what I’m doing,” he said, adding that a lot of the friends he grew up with are either in prison or dead.
In December, Addison was awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II for helping change the lives of more than 4,000 young kids.
The rise in knife attacks in Britain – from 2011 and 2018, the number of crimes involving a “sharp instrument” has increased by almost a quarter – may be misleading for an American audience. Despite rhetoric from President Donald Trump that singled out Britain’s knife attacks, there is no place in Britain where it is as dangerous for a teenager, from a homicide perspective, as in the United States.
“I recently read a story that in London, which has unbelievably tough gun laws, a once very prestigious hospital, right in the middle, is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds,” Trump said last year while addressing a meeting of the National Rifle Association, which campaigns for Americans’ right to bear arms.
“Yes, that’s right, they don’t have guns, they have knives, and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital,” he said. “Knives, knives, knives.”
In the United States, 10,982 people were murdered in cases involving firearms in 2017 (the most recent period for which data were available), according to the FBI. In Britain, over the same period, there were 32.