The father of Damilola Taylor today warned society has become “normalised” to youth violence.
Richard Taylor, 71 spoke after an event last night marking the 19th anniversary of his 10-year-old son’s death in Peckham.
He told the Standard: “It still pains me today as much as it did at the time. Something has gone badly wrong and I believe that only as a society can we put it right. We can start by challenging each other to be more caring. It is not for me to answer questions about how violence became so normalised for the whole of society.”
Amid rising knife crime fuelled by drugs, 25 teenagers have been killed this year in the capital, 23 of whom were stabbed to death.
Mr Taylor added had Damilola fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor “he would now be one of the heroic NHS staff tasked with trying to save young people with stab wounds”.
“Take a second to consider how uncaring and violent society has become,” he said. “How is it that there are now hundreds of families like mine that have lost children to acts of violence?” Damilola bled to death in a stairwell on a Peckham estate in 2000 after being stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle. Two brothers, 12 and 13 at the time of Damilola’s death, got eight years for his manslaughter in 2006.
Mr Taylor and his family gathered yesterday at the cemetery where Damilola and his mother Gloria, who died in 2008, are buried.
Yesterday afternoon he joined fellow anti-knife campaigners who met at The Ritzy cinema in Brixton to launch a series of events marking next year’s 20th anniversary. Mr Taylor said he was impressed by the work of Lib Peck who runs London’s Violence Reduction Unit which has adopted a public health approach, backed by the Standard, to eliminate knife crime.
He said: “Investment in violence prevention is absolutely the way forward to guarantee a generational change.
“I want 2020 to be seen as a year of hope for all those that care for the well-being, safety and development of young people.”
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