I was up at 4:00am this morning due to an unrelenting sore throat. Unfortunately there was no Paracetamol or Ibuprofen around at hand and finally out of sheer exhaustion, I took a big swig out of my daughters Childrens’ Motrin – it did say that for kids around 95 lbs range, you could take 3 tsps of the stuff. I mean, I am a bit heavier but it was a desperate time and it called for a desperate measure. That and a cup of green tea sort of made me feel like a human again. But I didn’t feel like going back to sleep again and so I did what I usually do when I feel this way – I started surfing.
The homepage on my browser is set to the Google UK News page and right away I was struck by the news of two young Imperial college exchange students who were brutally stabbed in their apartment. They were stabbed over 240 times in total and were probably tortured as well. Since moving to the UK last year I am struck by how many of these knife attacks seem to happen here. Almost every week there is at least one report of a teenager/young man/middle-aged father-of-two/senior citizen, stabbed or knifed and most of those times, fatally.
The level of this type of crime seems pretty high for a developed country with the 5th highest economy in the world. It is very likely that some of this is sensationalism by the media which seems to want to report the most gory of the attacks. However not all of it is just sensationalism. Apparently a knife crime occurs every 52 mintues in the UK and last year alone there were over 10,000 knife attacks.
Apparently young men between the ages of 14-24 are most likely to carry a knife and also at a much higher risk of being a victim. A survey done by the police last year showed that 46% of boys between the ages of 15-17 have carried a knife at some point or the other and the percentage rose to 62% if they were not in school. Most kids who carried knives said they did it in self-defence against bullies.
I was watching BBC Parliament the other day and was listening to a debate in the House of Lords over this issue. The main focus there seemed to be stricter laws and greater punishment for perpetrators of knife crimes. It was interesting to learn that if you stab someone to death you get a far lesser sentence that if you shoot them to death. Apparently, gun crimes are considered ‘more violent’ even if in both cases the victim ends up dead!
What I did not see in the debate was any talk of creating any programs to engage these young people in activities that might actually enrich their life. There was talk of zero-tolerance policies, increased CCTV coverage and metal detectors at schools but no one seemed interested (or atleast it was not brought up all the while I watched the debate) in funding or running programs to try and keep these kids at school during school-hours and engaging them in productive after-school activities or in providing them with technical or other skills to get jobs or in teaching them how to handle bullying – which they said was a big reason why they were going around with knives in the first place.
These politicians, who have voted yesterday to not cut down on their own funding in running their first and second households, seemed to be more focussed on the punishment rather than in offerring them other positive choices which would encourage them to give up crime on their own. I do keep hearing of programs in the news of ‘engaging the youth’, so I know that there are atleast some people who are trying other approaches. I wish them all the best in helping these kids and the rest of us too.
I stumbled upon a few sites that have more info on knife crimes here in the UK:
http://www.insight-security.com/facts-knife-crime-stats.htm
http://www.knifecrimes.org/uk-knife-crime-victims.html
[As a clarification, the second household that I mentioned above does not refer to the politicians mistress(es), although that may be part of it - no one is keeping track of accounts anyway. It is a second residence for those who need to buy a flat in London for when they come to town on official business. Yeah, right!]
Filed under: general, life in the UK | Tagged: insomnia, knife crimes
