Don’t Knife Your Life: Knife Crime in the UK

Over last year and the year before, gun crimes and stabbings in the UK pierced the news quite drastically. Helpless families have lost sons and brothers to very juvenile acts and over the past couple of years, the constant appearance of news like stabbings have rippled shockwaves among the residents of London. In 2008 alone, over a 100 stabbings took place in London (only London) and the police had to deal with 1664 “knife enabled” crimes where the possession of a knife was noticed. Hundred seems like a very small number but think of the next twenty four houses down your road. In one year, your family and all of the families in those twenty four houses wouldn’t be there. Even celebrities’ relatives like Brooke Kinsella’s – from Eastenders, a soap popular in the UK – brother Ben Kinsella and Robert Knox – a star from the Harry Potter films have been killed leaving their near and dead devastated. But as shocking as it is, in 2009, I haven’t read about as many incidents of stabbings or gun crimes. I wondered –I don’t live in the London, I live about an hour outside of it but I still know that in my town itself, there are people who carry knives. As the number of knife crimes increase, the ages of those committing the crime decrease and I find myself wondering why the news isn’t littered with headlines of knife crimes – is it because the knife crimes have reached an asymptote and the police know that they can’t do much about it or is it because knife crimes have genuinely stopped?

Knife crime and stabbings are always triggered by gangs. Gangs are stereotypically perceived as a bunch of boys hanging out in street corners but really gangs give a sense of security which is why they are formed in the first place. They play on the idea of protection coming from numbers. This protection is born through the idea of trust within the members of the gang but why need protection in the first place? Gangs, even though they give security, also deal with territories and boundaries. One gang in one particular area considers all those people in that area as the members of their gang and that area as their territory. Friction is then created when this territory is invaded by a member of another gang that the initial gang probably doesn’t get on well with. This invasion of territory is like demeaning a person. It’s like someone asking you to leave your own house so that they can watch your TV without being disturbed and this then leads to the gangs battling it out to mark out their territory, ultimately resulting in stabbings.