Teen violence

Continuing the theme I focused on in a recent First Past the Post article on knife crime, Mark Easton has posted an excellent piece on the BBC website today that further illuminates the discussion about the extent of youth crime

You will have course read about the two French students who were stabbed to death this week in London, and perhaps also how this news has fuelled fear of crime in the UK capital across the channel.

But Easton’s article cuts through much of the misinformation pedalled by our increasingly pessimistic press.

Figures on young people admitted to hospital with stab wounds suggests that the number of knife victims has increased over the past 5 years but it is intensely concentrated in London, suggesting that the UK is not in the grip of a pandemic of knife culture.

Easton presents this quite fascinating picture based on statistical analysis. In both 2002-03 and last year, no child was treated for a stab wound in the entire central and south eastern are of England outside London.

Surely knife use is deeply entwined with gang culture (although that is not to say that every victim is a gang member, since non gang members can be caught up in incidents for perfectly innocent reasons) and to attempt to address this needs radical solutions.