Why have stabbing attacks become so common in the UK?

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Written by: Valentina

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Why have stabbing attacks become so common in the UK?

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  4. Knife crime in the UK has risen from a historic low at the end of the last decade to the highest it has been since the mid 1990s, IIRC. There are several reasons for this. Post Great Recession austerity measures have reduced or entirely removed both community policing and youth and community provision, at the same time as an increase in excluding pupils from school. This creates a seed-bed for gangs, as you have a group of teenagers with nothing to do and no prospects of doing anything constructive until they are old enough to work in a McJob. They commit minor crimes, end up joining gangs, and carrying a knife as one of the tools of the trade.
    With not enough police on the streets, a less damaged school kid will also carry a knife out of fear and a need to defend themselves from the gangs. If they are caught carrying a knife by the school… it’s exclusion and then they are bored and on the streets with no prospects, etc. If they are caught by the police, it’s a caution or imprisonment and the cycle continues. And teenage hormones + concealed knife = regular teenage fights that go horribly wrong.
    This shouldn’t be seen as just a ‘society is to blame’ hand-wringing session, as there is responsibility on all sides, from a lack of parental role models and an inability to have honest discussions about your little unicorn’s future (not every nine year old is a future Mo Salah or tomorrow’s Stormzy, no matter how many thoughts, prayers, and wishes are involved) to a teenager culture of narcissism and bling (if your aspirations in life are a gold Rolex and a powder blue Bentley Continental R, jobs that involve the phrase ‘do you want fries with that?’ are less attractive than shunting 500g of coke across a county for £1,000 per night).
    In fairness to the UK though, the problem is not unique to the UK. Most Western societies have seen an uptick in violent crime, knife crime, and gun crime in recent years. A lot of which is related to drugs: the cocaine magnates of South America seeing Europe as rich and easy pickings, or the US’s opioid crisis. The main difference is in the reporting of such crime in the UK, because it plays well with the UK tabloid news agency’s long-held believe that fear sells. If every teenager is a knife-wielding homicidal maniac, the chattering classes will lock themselves in their homes and read newspapers or news websites. Whether this is better or worse than, say, the German news media stance of pretending a nine-fold increase in knife crime over the last ten years is not worth discussing… that remains to be seen.

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  5. This got me thinking about how it was for me growing up a poor working class white boy in inner London in the 1960s. The world I lived in was quite violent, lots and of people carried knifes, almost everyone I can think of participated in some sort of criminal (often petty) activity.
    I certainly got involved in crime, and violence, and as I got older I very nearly ended up making a career of it, plenty of my schoolfriends did. I can (but won’t) name some minor public figures from those days who started out as petty criminals and ended up as fairly respectable businessmen.
    A quick Google found this VIOLENT BRITAIN? IT WAS WORSE IN THE 60s
    So to be honest my experience as a 60 middle class Londoner who was a working class Londoner in the 1960s and 70s is that there is far less crime now, including knife crime.
    You won’t deter crime by teens with tough sentencing, I never thought for a moment about consequences, you need to provide them with better things to do, good role models they can (realistically) aspire to be, and opportunities to leave that life of poverty.

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  7. First things first. They still aren’t “common”
    You are more likely to die falling down the stairs than getting stabbed in London still. And it’s also still at a much lower rate than in many other city/countries.
    So while it’s increased a lot it has done so from s very low level.
    As to why?
    Imho it’s a combination of the conservative government cutting funds to social programs leaving kids feeling like they have less options and being more likely to join these sort of gangs and cuts to the funding of the Met police force meaning they are harder pressed to tackle such things.
    But overall London is still a VERY safe place for a large city, especially if you aren’t in a knife gang or involved in illegal drugs as large numbers of the victims are one or both of those.

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  14. Whilst the rise of stabbings is a concern, they aren’t common, and they still get on the news. I would also like to remind readers that most of this is in London, which isn’t typical of the rest of the UK. One issue that we do have is that the media seem to report this as a ‘gang culture’ thing, blaming youth. It is becoming increasingly apparent that quite a bit of this is down to organized crime, probably as a consequence of less active policing.

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