Leading article: There are ways we can tackle knife crime

There is a strand of opinion in Britain that regards the outcry about the levels of knife-crime as something whipped up by the media. Those who hold this view cite the statistics from the British Crime Survey, which suggest that knife crime, rather than rising, has remained stable over the past decade.

This is indeed what the statistics say. But as Cherie Blair pointed out to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee this week, this is by no means the complete picture. What the headline crime statistics fail to reflect is the extent to which the use of knives has increased among the young. A recent survey by the Youth Justice Board reported a 12 per cent increase in the number of teenagers carrying knives since 2002.

And then there is the body count. The stabbing of 16-year-old Ben Kinsella in London at the weekend took the number of teenagers killed in the capital this year to 17. Most of these children were killed by knives. Nor is this just a London phenomenon. Thirty-one young people have been stabbed to death around the country this year. Overall crime might well be falling; but so is the age of society's murder victims.

The response of the Government has been typically clumsy. Ministers have pledged to give the police portable scanners to search for concealed weapons. The courts have been instructed to come down harder on those found carrying a knife, no matter their age. The focus is all wrong. Searches and knife scanners simply go after the symptom, rather than the root cause of the illness. And locking up ever more children is not the answer. Britain already jails a higher proportion of our young people than any other nation in Europe and it has not made our streets any safer. Indeed, the demonising of young people seems to have made the problem worse.

Yet hand-wringing despair over knife crime is just as dangerous. Gun crime in the capital's black community has been reduced substantially in recent years, mainly thanks to the success of the Metropolitan Police's dedicated Operation Trident team. This shows that, when the police concentrate on a particular social blight, they can deliver results. What we need is a similarly concerted effort to break the teenage gang culture.

Intensive and robust policing is, of course, necessary to make young people feel safer. One of the key drivers in young people carrying knives is that they do not feel protected by the police. But just as important are social intervention projects. Knife crime is most prevalent in areas of high social deprivation and social exclusion. The police, local government and youth charities need to combine to tackle the poverty of ambition that prevails in too many poor areas. They need to establish peer mentoring services. Local figures who have made a success of their lives need to be persuaded to return to talk about their experiences. Young people need to be given an alternative to the knife-carrying gang culture. An initiative in Hackney has shown some encouraging success in this area. We need to build on this.

There are other things politicians can do. More pressure needs to be exerted on computer game manufacturers, heads of advertising companies and television executives to be more mindful of the impact of their output on impressionable minds. Official censorship is out of the question, but there is no reason why greater efforts should not be made to take some of the "glamour" out of depictions of violence. The first step towards solving a problem is to admit that it exists. The hundreds of friends and relatives of Ben Kinsella who marched through the capital this week, united in mourning and protest, understand that a change in our society is desperately needed. The rest of us must face up to it too.

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