Our society encourages violence and it must end

2:40pm Friday 19th September 2008

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Two high-profile stabbings in Sussex in the past week have raised concerns that knife crime is becoming more prevalent than ever.

Teacher Dr Stuart Newton, from Brighton, explains why he believes knife crime is getting worse – and why parents must take their share of the blame.

I am staggered that there is so much knife crime in Sussex.

About 12 months ago I did a survey of children in secondary schools and 6% said that they had carried a knife at some point while walking around Brighton.

The problem has been around for a long time and we have chosen to ignore it. I and many of my colleagues have worked with young people and there is a culture of violence.

The problems which happen in the evening get carried over into social groups. We should not be surprised that when we cultivate a culture of violence in our society that it can backfire on us.

I am surprised that it has taken such a long time to come to the surface in big cities and you have to bear in mind that our society does actually encourage violence.

It is often used a a form of entertainment so why are we surprised that people pick up knives?

We are good at being hypocritical even though we are not giving sufficient guidance to young people.

The attack in Littlehampton on the young woman was appalling and the fact that the man accused of attacking her is a paranoid schizophrenic makes it difficult to deal with. There are no quick solutions to cope with it.

Our idea of allowing these people into the community needs to be tighter and more thoughtful. One has to think about the rights of the poor woman who was assaulted.

I do not think you can regulate people with mental illness unless you do something more restrictive but this would go down like a lead balloon.

There is no way anyone can legislate for that. An attack could happen at any time, in any place and with any weapon.

With young people, we have to start with actually deciding what to do. We tell them knife crime is wrong when we have the most devastating cases of people being murdered but those who have not been affected by knife crime say that we should not have too many rules because we will be at risk of becoming a nanny state.

I do not think we have a clear idea of what it is that we want in our society. There are so many other countries in the world which have been far clearer on the rules of what is acceptable.

I am not blaming young people. We are the adults and we are in charge, we make the rules and give guidance. But I am constantly amazed at the good behaviour of children in Eastern European countries.

My foster son comes from Romania and knows about life at the sharp end of deprivation. Yet he is far more civilised than some of the youngsters here who have been given everything.

I am not completely laying the blame on the youngsters themselves.

They were not born like that, they were made like that by adults. I have no doubt that by Christmas, at least 20 more families across the country will be without a loved one because they have become a victim of knife crime.

The situation is getting worse and it will continue to get worse because we are not prepared politically or socially to do anything about it.

Our politicians are saying they will send knife crime offenders to prison for five years but youngsters with knives on the street do not think they are going to get caught.

We cultivate violence in a way which I think other countries do not.

Our young people are getting a pretty raw deal.

It seems like we do not impose any rules because we do not want to upset anybody.

It’s about time the message came over that we will not tolerate people carrying knives and that violence is not acceptable.

What can we do to keep control of the escalating problem of knife crime? Tell us below.