When the Guardian embarked on a project to investigate the rising number of children and teenagers being stabbed in 2017, our reporters expected to encounter people traumatised by extreme violence. The loss of a child or young person is always hard to bear, but when they have died as the result of deliberate aggression, the anger and regret of those left behind can be overwhelming. The series, Beyond the Blade, sought to tell the stories of these victims in more detail than they are usually afforded. It also looked for the patterns that underlay the rise in this form of crime.
The picture that emerged from our reporting and analysis was not the one that any reader conditioned by tabloid news values would have expected. “Knife crime”, it turned out, was a problem that had disproportionately affected male black youths in London in 2017. But one of that year’s 39 young victims was a baby girl and nationally, over the past decade, most victims have been white. Worryingly, politicians appeared to lack the detailed, in-depth knowledge that would enable them to tackle what remains a fraught and contested area.
Over the past few months, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has begun to address this deficit. The launch of a violence reduction unit modelled on a public health approach pioneered in Chicago, and then applied in Glasgow, was a welcome, if overdue, step. Now ministers have got on board, with the announcement of a national “public health duty” to tackle serious violence, including knife crime. Under the new law, public bodies including councils, NHS trusts and police will be required to share intelligence, with the aim of protecting young people. This obligation placed on organisations replaces an earlier idea of holding individual doctors and teachers directly accountable, and makes much more sense, even if the lack of resources affecting all public services is certain to stymie effective action. Recent figures showed the homicide rate in England and Wales to be at its highest for a decade.
An overly disciplinarian approach has been the bane of crime and justice policies in the UK at least since Margaret Thatcher, with rhetoric about toughness preferred to evidence-based policy for political reasons. The malign effects of such deliberate stupidity include strained relations between police and minority communities who are disproportionately targeted by “stop and search” tactics, overcrowded prisons and a poor record on rehabilitation. A decade of cuts and Chris Grayling’s failed probation privatisation have worsened an already bad situation, and the new emphasis on prevention will not reverse these harms.
But the announcement of a public health duty is significant all the same. That’s because it reframes youth violence as a problem with causes that go beyond bad choices by individual miscreants. Public health is all about social determinants. In other words, poverty, inequality and the risk factors linked to both: addiction, exclusion from education and recreation, discrimination, domestic violence, unemployment, homelessless and poor housing. Such life experiences can, in turn, make children vulnerable to the drug dealers who prey on them and who have, in a few disturbing cases, been convicted of modern slavery offences. Social media too has been shown to play a role in amplifying petty disputes.
That prevention is better than treatment should go without saying when lives are at stake. That senior police officers including the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, are on board with the new thinking is a positive sign. But progress will only come with renewed investment in communities and education. As long as so many of the gaps created by a combination of budget cuts and deliberate fragmentation of public services remain, vulnerable young people will continue to fall through the cracks.
