May 29th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Violent crime is becoming more vicious, thanks to a fad for knives

THE weekend had hardly begun before Rob Knox was dead. The 18-year-old had tried to break up a fight outside a bar in south-east London when he was stabbed, fatally, in the early hours of May 24th. Five others were hurt in the fracas. The rest of the bank-holiday weekend saw two youths injured in a knife fight in Nottingham, five men slashed in a pub in London, one man stabbed to death in Bradford and another dead after a knife attack in Bristol.

From all this one might think that deaths by the blade were becoming more common. That isn't the case. Last year 258 people were killed by sharp instruments, a number that has barely changed since the turn of the millennium. As a proportion of total homicides (which have been rising slowly for decades), death by sharp instrument is no more frequent now than it was ten years ago, though knives remain Britain's favourite murder weapon. The British Crime Survey (BCS), an official annual questionnaire, suggests that violent crime has fallen dramatically in recent years. Yet people are increasingly worried about it.

And with reason. Violent crime may have fallen overall, but that is thanks to the halving of domestic violence and fighting among friends since 1997. Those falls hide an increase in violence at the hands of strangers, which has risen by 14% during the same period. And although murder is not much more common than it used to be, non-fatal attacks seem to be getting more serious. The BCS asks victims if they were traumatised by their ordeal; last year 86% of those who had been attacked by strangers said they were, against 74% in 2002. The likelihood of being badly hurt has gone up too. In 2002 8% of victims needed to see a doctor; by 2005 that figure had doubled.

An increase in knife-carrying might explain the grislier attacks. Youth workers, who have a seen-it-all-before attitude towards most supposedly new problems, tend to agree that blades have become more common. This is tentatively backed up by the Youth Justice Board, which reckons a third of those aged between 11 and 16 occasionally carry a knife (though most are penknives). The police are arresting many more people for possession, though this partly reflects more zealous use of “stop and search” powers. Judges have spotted the trend too. Nicholas Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, thinks “there has been an increase in carrying weapons.”

The police are stepping up their stops-and-searches, a tactic that some fear will stoke resentment among young black men, who tend to be searched more than others. Black leaders themselves are increasingly in favour, though they say it would be a less touchy subject if the police were not so white. London's new mayor plans to introduce detailed “crime maps”, highlighting hotspots. That is a gamble. Young knife carriers say they go armed for self-defence, to protect themselves from others' blades. Anything that advertises the presence of knife crime might reinforce the idea that going unarmed is risky.

That is, if teenagers' behaviour in this area is at all rational. It may be that knife carrying, and the violence that goes with it, is basically a copycat craze. Lord Phillips suspects it is “a fashion, a bad peer example”. In most years the number of homicide victims between 11 and 19 in London hovers in the mid-teens. Last year it hit 26 and this year is heading higher. The police know of no single thing that has caused the outbreak.

There is an unnerving parallel. A few months ago Bridgend, a Welsh town, witnessed 19 young suicides in quick succession, each apparently inspired by the last. Emotional tributes and alarmist news coverage are now believed to have provided unwitting encouragement, by adding romance to the miserable business of dying young. The teenagers who die in knife fights on the streets receive similar eulogies. Is the same chain reaction at work?