The Knives Are Out

Apparently the correct way to a) deal with a dispute or b) settle a score with an individual/the society that has betrayed you is to stab someone. With 29 teenagers murdered in London alone this year, the press is covering the alarming rise of knife crime with typical sensationalising alacrity.

Some have already argued that the media's graphic reports of such incidents will only perpetuate the problem; that the articles somehow become self-fulfilling prophecies. This is not the case. With such thorough coverage, the media is not instigating the cause but reacting to the effect of knife crime. Such reporting is both moral and desirable. The public has a right to know what is going on and to choose to interpret whether or not it affects them.

When it comes to knife crime, there are two things that need scrutinising. Why do young people feel compelled to use a weapon on another - often unknown - individual? And what can be done to stop them?

An article in the Independent interviews Camila Batmanghelidjh, who blames the spate of attacks on two factors. In a somewhat formulaic approach, she attests that, "social and emotional deprivation" + "the absence of a functioning parental figure"= inevitable crime.

Batmanghelidjh's initiative, Kids Company has opened, amongst others, a walk-in centre in Camberwell, where young, disaffected people can go and get an evening meal, shelter and varying degrees of psychotherapy. They are often victims of domestic violence and neglect. Although her intent may be laudable, the idea that these are the exact demographic who are killing fellow teenagers is not as axiomatic as Batmanghelidgh would like to think.

It is not always the case that a teenager who carries a knife is a victim of fragmented upbringing. And, since society is not always to blame for the woes of such individuals, it is not fair, nor even logical, that society has to feel their discontent.

People carry a knife for a number of reasons - protection, status, bravado. But they do not always do it because of an absent father or a drug-addicted mother.

Batmanghelidjh tells of such fear and defenselessness that the adoption of knives for many is the only option. But the attacks receiving such a frenzied media coverage are not acts of self-defence or (so far as we know) gang-related retribution. These are meaningless and erroneously challenged acts of cowardly violence. Youths who perpetrate such acts are bullies, often a result of being bullied themselves. Jimmy Mizen and Robert Knox stood up bravely to the bully, and they paid with their lives when other, less valiant individuals would have taken flight and survived.

Stabbings are a socially manifested result of the confidence and feeling of superiority that comes with carrying a weapon. Youths recognise they are beyond legal reproach (figures show that although 1,226 under-18s were arrested for possession in 2006, a meager 72 were arrested) and so they take this feeling of invincibility into other encounters. If they don't get what they feel they have a right to get, by virtue of being armed, they dispose of human life. This is not brave, this is not tragic, and it certainly not a result of social neglect. It is a result of a lack of disciplinary or pedagogical intervention with youths, or even a lack of individual motivation to accept such intervention.

If we can't generalise over the type of person who carries a knife, we can at least identify some possible reasons for such a widespread practice. Most young people are more inclined to carry a knife because, currently at least, the punishments for doing so do not amount to a sufficient deterrent.

Today's Guardian leader implies that knife carrying youths are "a monstrous by-product of mounting inequality". It is perfectly natural to feel revulsion and cowardice towards the individuals who have wronged you, but to equate those emotions with the wider public - and innocent bystanders - is hopelessly and needlessly wrong.

Listening to this, youths who stab lack structure, solace and solitude. Prison would give them that, but only if the government and their idiotic 'Children's Tsar' realise that stop and search, harder punitive measures and a zero-tolerance policy on carrying a weapon is not demonizing the guilty. It is preventing the innocent from victimhood.

The risk of causing offence should not come into the legislative opposition to knife crime. At an immediate legal level, carrying a knife should imply an intent to use it. Whilst it doesn't follow that if someone carries a knife they will inevitably use it, it is true that if they don't, they won't.

A government-funded report offers the earth-shattering insight that, "knife carrying can be a precursor to knife use in crime and is thus a matter for concern". Good. But then it goes on to deny the correlative link between carrying a knife and using one:

"knife carrying and knife use rarely result in stabbing".

The two are not mutually exclusive, and shouldn't be so in law. Murder charges are tough (some say) but to be caught carrying a knife and getting away with it only increases the likelihood of a knife being carried again, and then used.

But, as the Mayor is continually telling us, we need to tackle the causes of the problem, which surely means involvement and intervention much earlier in an individual's upbringing? Or at least an educational, community based initiative which extols the virtue of not taking a career in crime. It's foolish to deny that there are teenagers beaten, undernourished and abused in London. But it's also foolish to suggest that all of them turn to crime. It might help to show would be murderers that there are other routes of progression from a tough start in life.

In the sense of targeting causes, increased social and educational measures could be employed to inform youths that knives are not the inevitable consequence of any sort of toughness in early life, whether that be society's fault or not. A proactive - instead of a reactive - process of intervention would reverse the perception that society is always to blame and so should pay. It might be the case that society is doing enough to help youths, but too quietly and reactionarily.

I am not usually one to accept the intervention of the Government in personal lives. I'd argue you should be able to do more or less what you like, so long as nobody else is affected. It's selfish, but a ruling party cannot and should not aim to change a personality, only its social ramifications.

The Government is resisting pressure to be tougher on knife crime in a legal and absolutist sense. It doesn't sit well with calls from think tanks and charities who argue that these children who murder need love, not more negativity. Here arises a false dichotomy between preventative and reactionary discipline.

Were there powers to intervene much earlier in the downward spiral of an individual's development, it would be easier to wean them off the route of violence. In a similar way, if there were tougher powers to prevent the crime of carrying a weapon, we wouldn't need to worry ourselves with how we are going to punish or hope to prevent the murders they cause.

You can't expect every disaffected youth to be saved and turn away from crime. Nor can you sympathise with all knife-wielders as society's mistakes. Early governmental and social intervention might help ease the problem for future generations. In the immediate term, however, we need tougher action to prevent people carrying knives. If they don't carry one they can't use it, and then no-one gets murdered over a petty dispute. Now there's a novel idea.