- The Observer,
- Sunday May 18 2008
- Article history
Although crime has dropped in London, fear of violent crime is high. Michael Stephens/PA
One in three young people living in cities thinks it is acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife, according to research revealed today. Teenagers and twenty-somethings have lost faith in politicians, the police or schools to protect them and increasingly believe they need to be armed to defend themselves against people of their own age. Nearly half said they knew someone who had been a victim of knife crime.
The survey has been released as the Home Office prepares to launch a national advertising campaign aimed at teenagers who carry knives for protection, warning that doing so makes them more likely to be stabbed. Mothers will also be targeted by ads in women's magazines urging them to talk to their children about the risk of carrying weapons.
However, experts warned that unless children can be made to feel safer on the streets, they are unlikely to give up their weapons. 'There is a picture of young people completely taking it for granted that guns and knives and violence is a kind of everyday part of their landscape,' said Don Slater, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.
The survey of 355 people aged 16 to 24 in London, Manchester and Bristol was carried out by Tuned In, a market research company specialising in youth issues. It found 30 per cent said it was acceptable sometimes to carry a knife while 23 per cent would use one. One in 10 claimed to have had access to a gun.
A third admitted that fear of gun and knife crime affected where they went out socially while 34 per cent believed that they would witness a knife attack.
Slater said that young people's perceptions risked creating a 'self fulfilling prophecy' as they reacted to the perceived threat by taking up weapons. He said knives were not seen as glamorous accessories, and that politicians who attacked 'gangsta' culture or rap music were missing the point: 'Nobody that I could see was glamorising what was going on: gangs were not popular.'
The Home Office advertising campaign to be launched later this month will argue that those who carry knives raise the risk of having their own weapon used against them as well as of escalating fights that would once have been settled by fists. It was designed in consultation with teenagers themselves.
The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, said the £1m campaign would 'challenge the fear, glamour and peer pressure that can drive youngsters to knife crime', alongside recent moves to double the maximum sentence for carrying a knife to four years.
However, Enver Solomon of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College said there was little research on what worked in deterring knife carrying. He said the unit had been told by senior Met officers that the most pragmatic response would be to train teenagers in first aid in the hope that more stabbing victims could be kept alive until emergency help reached them.
He said stop and search campaigns similar to a police exercise in London last week were of limited use, since seizing knives did not take them out of circulation when a teenager could easily take another one from the kitchen: 'It is a losing battle trying to confiscate them.'
· Two teenagers were in a critical condition yesterday after they were stabbed outside a nightclub in London's Brick Lane during the early hours.
