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UK anti-knife crime strategy fails - deaths rise

by LotusFlower | July 21, 2009 at 11:34 pm

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Knife crime in the UK has been a hot topic for the last year with the government running a high-profile campaign to reduce the carrying of knives and deaths caused by stabbings.

Figures released today by the Home Office seem to show that overall the campaign does not seem to have resulted in less knife homicides in fact the figures overall have gone up.

There have been knife amnesties in targeted locations with thousands of knives from kitchen to flick handed in to police collection points and TV and billboard ad campaigns - but still the knife carrying culture persists amongst some groups of young people and adults. Calls for the government to introduce a national Knife Amnesty have so far been rejected.

A closer examinantion of the statistics seems to show that in targeted areas hospital admissions due to stabbings amongst young people do seem to have dropped and home secretary and Labour Party leader contender Alan Johnson is heralding this as a success.

The high-profile government campaign to tackle knife crime in big English cities has failed to cut the number of fatal stabbings, according to Home Office figures published today.

The number of teenage homicide victims of knife crime remained unchanged at 23, while the number of adults over the age of 20 killed actually went up during the campaign by seven to 103, results of the official monitoring programme show.

The failure of the £3m campaign to reduce the number of teenagers killed in knife attacks in England's 10 priority police areas is a severe embarrassment to ministers on a highly political crime issue that is likely to dominate the debate on law and order between now and the general election.

Ministers will tomorrow launch a £5m second phase of the "tackling knives action programme" (TKAP) which will see the campaign expanded to 16 police force areas and widened to tackle all forms of serious violence among 13- to 24-year-olds, including gang culture.

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duo

at 06:01 on July 22nd, 2009

Live by the sword, die by the sword. That's how it is. Violence begets violence. Where is the love?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H1r1BMmGbc

Paschen

at 06:48 on July 22nd, 2009

Forbidding some thing does not work in general. Educating and attaching a code of honour to it may make a difference though.

In our culture Swords and Knifes are common and every Man and Youth wears one. However, there is a code of honour attached to it and it is culturally strongly embedded in the society.

Culture and community as well as family can not be replaced by laws.

What is needed is to rebuild the communities and cultures and promote the family and protect the family as an essential institution to society.