Readers flicking through this paper will be shocked by the number of stabbings Southwark saw this last week. There were four separate incidents involving victims as young as fifteen and four seventeen-year-old suspects.
While joining police on a patrol around Peckham last November, Sadiq Khan warned the cost of living crisis could push more young people into gang crime. According to City Hall, the number of under 25-year-olds injured through knife crime has dropped by 22 per cent since 2016, but Khan is worried that fall could be reversed.
And this fear is clearly spreading to parents too. The News recently heard that parents in Dulwich were so concerned by a spate of robberies that they’d considered employing a private security agency to patrol the streets at times when children are walking home from school.
Attempted murder charge for seventeen-year-old after stabbing by the Old Kent Road McDonald’s
The horror of children stabbing each other has no simple cure and it would be a knee-jerk reaction to attribute this sudden spike to economic pressures. Does there need to be earlier intervention in schools? Would harsher sentences help? Do we need more community centres? This is an ongoing conversation.
We agree that preventative measures like these are hugely important, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are quick, practical things we can do to save the lives of young people injured in violent crime. That is why we support Let the Youth Live’s ongoing project to install bleed control kits throughout south London, most recently at the Pyrotechnists Arms pub in Nunhead.
Every time a person is stabbed, a life can be lost. We must do everything we can, both palliative and preventative, to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Teenager arrested on suspicion of GBH after a fifteen-year-old was stabbed in Peckham