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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser.

5 June 2009

Last month, the dangerous thug who launched a frenzied knife attack on a Dover man by repeatedly stabbing him and slashing his face was found guilty of attempted murder and was jailed indefinitely for the offence.

The attack, which took place in Dover, was horrific by any standards but I suppose we should be grateful that the volume of knife crime in our part of the country is still relatively low – unfortunately, that can’t be said for our big towns and city centres.

Across the country, fatal stabbings comprise a tiny minority of all knife offences and over the last decade they have accounted for roughly a third of all homicides. But there was a significant rise in deaths in 2007 and 2008 when there were 270 fatal knife attacks – the highest since counting started in 1997 – and this has given rise to concern.

It was with this background that my Home Affairs Select Committee launched their inquiry into knife crime and this week we published our report. We found that – as with overall violence – the majority of knife victims and perpetrators are young men in their late teens and early twenties. There is also a significant proportion of knife offending involved in domestic violence incidents.

We found that the high levels of knife violence since 2006 appear to be the direct result of an increase in street violence between gangs. Rural areas have experienced a small increase in knife injuries with police recording over 22,000 such incidents in England and Wales last year but the majority of knife violence is very much concentrated in the deprived parts of our big cities.

It is difficult to estimate how many young people carry knives but our committee fears that it’s almost becoming ‘normal practice’ in some areas. We found that young people tend to carry pen knives or flick knives, but kitchen knives are more commonly used in stabbings and we heard that most young people who carry knives do so for ‘protection’; for status and because of peer pressure. All of these elements can be reinforced by some of the more dramatic media coverage which spreads the myth amongst youngsters that everyone else is carrying a weapon – so why don’t I ?

Our findings convinced us of the need to target knife-carriers and violent offenders separately. For the former, we advocate education in schools about the realities of knife-carrying and measures to help young people feel safer, such as improving confidence in the police and better victim support.

We support the use of stop and search, providing it is carried out in an appropriate manner and while we have encouraged the use of custody for the majority of knife-carriers – high re-offending rates highlight the need for something more and that’s why we recommend the expansion of offending behaviour and resettlement programmes to reduce re-offending.

Finally, we advocate the adoption of a long-term violence reduction strategy that focuses on prevention because investing resources in these initiatives have been proved hugely successful in those places it’s been implemented.