Earlier this month, a young female police officer received potentially life-changing injuries when she was stabbed, along with a male colleague, in Leicester Square. It is a tragic reminder of the human stories behind the ‘knife-enabled assault with injury’ stats that are now on the rise again following the pandemic.

In fact, the number of knife-enabled assaults with injury or intent to harm have remained stubbornly above 20,000 per year since 2018 – and that doesn’t even include numbers from Greater Manchester Police.

New Home Secretary Suella Braverman is understandably ‘concerned’ by this latest violent attack, by a young man in his twenties,  but what can society do to stop these attacks creeping ever higher? What effective knife crime resources do we have?

Knife crime resources

As covered in depth in Getting Real With Guns And Knives, society’s knife crime resources often boil down to suppression (i.e., cracking down on criminals) and early intervention, stopping knife crime before it happens.

Early intervention approaches, especially those involving multiple agencies, are widely accepted as being the most effective. In fact, a Scottish early intervention programme – No Knives, Better Lives – has been credited with an 85% reduction in the number of young people convicted for handling an offensive weapon.

Justice-based interventions

In England, anyone aged 10 to 17 years and caught in possession of a knife will automatically be referred to a youth offending team. They will often be placed on a knife crime awareness programme, such as a Knife Crime Prevention Programme (KCPP). These are run over a number of weeks by local councils and focus on both awareness raising and youth engagement: listening to the concerns of young offenders.

Family-based interventions

Family interventions may focus on improving how parents and their children communicate with one another. By helping to overcome communication issues, third parties such as the police or social workers can provide parents with material that will help them drive preventative messages home.

Parents may be advised to work together to support one another and share knife crime resources, and there are many helplines and grassroots organisations that can sometimes help.

While family intervention programmes can have positive outcomes, it makes a lot of sense to target early interventions at schools, where multiple children can be engaged with at once.

School-based interventions

When people think about school-based knife crime resources, they often imagine a lecture where somebody, maybe a police officer, stands in front of the class and warns students about the legal consequences of carrying a blade.

These approaches rarely work, especially with those young people most at risk of carrying weapons. It is now common for schools to take a public health approach to violence, as advocated by the World Health Organisation. This treats violence like an infection that can be cured, with violent offenders as victims.

There are many different ways that schools can provide knife crime resources and interventions, including:

  • Externally sourced knife crime workshops as part of their PSHE provision
  • In-house knife crime awareness lessons. This is an efficient way to deliver knife crime interventions, with teachers and staff booking a knife crime training package
  • One-to-one interventions with children at particular risk of carrying knives
  • Knife crime books, videos and worksheets (although these are best used as supplementary knife crime resources)

If you are looking to engage with young people about knife crime in your school or youth organisation, consider booking a 2020 Dreams Knife Crime Workshop. We deliver age appropriate PSHE workshops throughout the UK, and we can tailor content to meet specific topics or cater for a particular demographic.

Please get in touch today and help stop the scourge of knife crime in your community.

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