Teen knife violence UK’s alarming ‘new normal'”

#Teen #knife #violence #UKs #alarming #normal

Recruited by a drug gang at the age of eight, Rice was part of Britain’s violent knife crime “crisis” until his best friend was fatally stabbed and in his arms. Died.

“Another friend of mine drowned in a river, another got stabbed, another got acid thrown on them. Another got shot twice,” Rice, now 28, told A. told FP.

The turning point for Rice, who now works to educate kids about the dangers of knives, drugs and gangs, came a decade ago when his best friend, a 17-year-old , after wandering down the street, stumbled from his house.

“My fingers were in his chest and everything was trying to stop the blood,” he told AFP.

Britain is in the midst of an epidemic of teenage knife crime that Prime Minister Keir Starr has called a “national crisis”.

Incident after incident reveals a horrific knife culture involving young children slightly larger than life, often at the hands of others their own age.

Cases of mistaken identity, minor insults, drug gang turf wars or just pure crime can all trigger tragic results.

Killed for Teddy Bear

According to official government figures, knife crime in England and Wales has been rising steadily since 2011.

Excluding the northern city of Manchester, there were 50,973 crimes involving a sharp instrument in the year ending June 2024, compared with 36,000 in the year ending March 2011 – a 41% increase.

Statistics on national knife deaths are hard to find. But last year, 10 young people died in stabbings in London, the Metropolitan Police told AFP.

Among them was 15-year-old Elian Andam, who his family described as full of “hopes and dreams for the future”, who died in September after being stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife on his way to school.

A “bright and funny” schoolgirl was murdered by her friend’s 17-year-old ex-boyfriend after the pair rowed over returning a teddy bear.

On Thursday, Axel Rodakobana, 18, was sentenced to life in prison and less for stabbing three teenage girls and trying to kill 10 others at a July dance class in Southport, northwest England. Ordered to serve a minimum of 52 years.

Earlier this month, 14-year-old Kellyanne Bokassa became the first victim of 2025, being hit 27 times by a bus in front of horrified passengers.

“It feels like a war zone,” said his mother, Mary Bokassa. Two boys, aged 15 and 16, have been charged with her murder.

On Tuesday, 12-year-old Leo Ross – described by his family as “funny and sweet” – died after walking in a park in central Birmingham. A 14-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of her murder.

Police have warned for a decade now that drug gangs are expanding their operations outside London and other major cities.

In the largely rural Avon in south-west England and Somerset in south-west England, speeding vehicle offenses rose by 32 per cent in the year to June 2024, citing government figures.

In a chilling case in Wolverhampton, near Birmingham, last year two 12-year-olds became Britain’s youngest knife killers.

He was convicted of murdering an 18-year-old stranger, Sean Sisahai, after he asked to leave a park bench.

Children are killing children

A nationwide ban on “zombie” style knives with blades longer than eight inches (20 cm) was introduced in September.

But London Metropolitan University criminologist James Alexander, who studies blade crime, said children hitting children was now “the new normal”.

He explores the situation of housing estates in London in deprived areas.

To “survive,” he said, anyone living on the property needed to demonstrate that they could be violent, so that they could carry a knife … so other people knew they could … from it. Shouldn’t be messed with”.

As community ties weakened and the drug trade flourished over the past two decades, he said, young people have grown estranged from neighbors and family members who previously served as informal mentors.

London’s Met Police chief, Mark Rowley, has said he fears knife crime is being “normalized” because it is dismissed as gang crime that will not affect most people.

Increasingly, however, young people have no previous ties to drugs or gangs.

A year ago in a case of mistaken identity in west Bristol, childhood friends Mason Rest, 15, and 16-year-old Max Dixon, who had gone out for pizza, were chased to death.

Reformed knife-carrier Rice now works as a mentor to teach runaway children from the charity how gangs groom youngsters – befriending them, offering them money and gifts – before railroading them. shower with them and threaten their families if they try to leave.

“There’s a lot of willingness to work but it’s going to take a lot of resources to break the new normal and a lot of people change their view of what to do,” Alexander added.