It’s best not to speculate on individual cases, but for all the wrong reasons Bristol is hitting the national headlines at the moment. Stabbings, some fatal, and now the tragic case of the death of three children, including a ten month old baby, in Sea Mills. Precious human lives snuffed out before they even really got going, for reasons we may or may never know. How do we make sense of our world? Nothing seems to make sense, does it?
The obvious answer to that is that of course it does make no sense, certainly not in any kind of philosophical sense. The only thing is does appear to prove is the sheer randomness of our lives and that beyond procreation our lives, all of our lives, are utterly pointless.
There are those who suggest that everything happens for a reason. Well, in a sense that’s true. If a plane crashes because an engine falls off, there’s your reason. If you don’t watch where you are going and stand in some dog shit, there’s your reason. But the idea that everything is planned in advance and that we are resigned to our inevitable fate, dictated in all likelihood by a supernatural dictator, is simply nonsense. If someone is stabbed to death by someone wielding a zombie knife, that’s going to be hard to explain to a grieving relative by simply saying, “Well, it happened for a reason.”
Is children carrying knives around something brand new? I cannot back this up with substantial amounts of evidence, but I did know of kids at my senior school in the early 1970s who did carry knives. I knew it because they played ‘Splits’, or ‘Split the kipper‘ as it is apparently known in some places, whereby people, in this instance kids, would throw their knives at each other. In those heady days, kids didn’t use machetes or zombie knives, they used pen knives. Disputes, more often not, were settled with a good old fashioned fist fight.
I am not in any way qualified to suggest which type of people get involved in knife crime, although anecdotally some areas of towns and cities do seem to be more prone to it than others. I don’t know if it’s an epidemic, either, although knife crime seems to be reported more widely than ever in the media.
Maybe we need another ‘crackdown’ because that’s what governments always announce when something is out of control and they don’t have a clue how to deal with it. Let’s increase sentences, make it a crime to carry any kind of knife, more stop and search, parade the perpetrators in stocks – we do all these things and nothing really changes. Of course, we need to get the miscreants banged up but if the deterrents aren’t working and all we are doing is filling up already full prisons, aren’t we just giving up and resigning ourselves to more and more knife crime?
Maybe, too, we do need experts after all, experts who can engage with young people who are perhaps more at risk of getting involved with knife crime than others? Why do they carry knives and what do they hope to achieve by carrying them? I find it very hard to believe that, at least to start with, it’s for self-defence. To suggest it’s purely a law and order matter is surely a cop out? The decline of society, even as it could be the managed decline of society, may well be playing a part. We won’t re-establish respect just by saying it. Words, as ever, are not enough.
There’s been a stabbing incident in Little Stoke, which is barely a mile from where we live, normally a peaceful, largely middle class area. Not literally on our doorstep but near enough. And now people are fearful that their children may end up in the wrong place in the wrong time, with catastrophic consequences.
New Labour promised to be tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, and to be fair the evidence proves they were, as the improving infrastructure of the country brought about a significant fall in crime. 14 years of austerity may well have had a role, perhaps a major role, in a country where it feels that everything is broken and nothing works.
I wish all the killing and the maiming would stop, but wishing on it’s own won’t change a thing. And feeling so helpless about it hangs heavy, I suspect, on all of us, as yet more lives are ended and ruined by another senseless death, fearful as we are that the next event will be closer to home.
