Last night I heard police sirens. “Please, please not again.” There are so many stabbings; the police aren’t always called, but the A&E doctors tell us how many they treat. I then woke up to a bizarre discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme about whether drill music makes boys knife each other. God knows what’s happening when you have to quote Goldie Lookin Chain, but it was all a bit “Guns don’t kill people, rappers do”.
It would be a relief, in some ways, to think that music could be responsible for murder. Last week it was social media. Some days it is police cuts. Some days it’s the lack of stop and search. Some days it is white people taking drugs that cost black lives. None of this is new. None of it helps much when you see the flowers wilting against a wall and the women trying to keep their sons in at night and the grim-faced teenagers waiting for retaliation, wondering who will be next.
Children killing other children is now seen as an epidemic but, of course, rather like refugees, most of these young men are not seen as children at all. They are seen as gang members, hardened criminals, dangerous thugs, even when they are only 13. They are often excluded from school and by 14 are already considered unsalvageable. For all the daft braggadocio about being disrespected, they are telling a kind of truth. They are not respected or even seen as kids who need support. As Lewis Iwu, campaigner for education equality, has pointed out, Caribbean boys on free school meals and with special needs are 168 times more likely to be excluded than white girls who are not on free school meals.
The last time I wrote about this was more than 10 years ago. One of my daughter’s friends was killed. She went to a lot of funerals that year. She was 17. The response then was: “Well, don’t live in London.” Indeed, I have seen a few concerned parents move out of the city when they became concerned their kids might be dabbling in bad stuff. But that’s not an option for most people. Instead, I just see mothers begging their sons to stay home. And yes, of course I see aggressive and alienated boys, but I also see trauma. They carry knives to defend themselves and big themselves up at the same time as they take two different buses to school to avoid certain areas.
This trauma is not simply about police cuts. Sure, get more police out there, but it’s about how we approach this issue. This is about mental health and its interaction with racism, not just crime .
Scotland obviously has a different set of problems, but it has brought knife crime down by treating this as a public health issue. Whatever Theresa May says, the mental health of our young people is obviously not a priority. NHS children and adolescent mental health services (Camhs) is totally overwhelmed; self-harm, suicide, anger and depression are rife.
All of this requires early intervention in primary, not secondary school. Yet schools, having to choose between counsellors and teachers, keep teachers. Budgets for youth services have been slashed. Neighbourhood policing barely exists, so what happens to these boys who have written themselves off at 13? I am not saying they are all innocent; they clearly do vile things, but we have now reached a point where we are asking the police to intervene before crime is committed. We are asking teachers to be social workers. We are asking communities often now dispersed by housing policy to step in.
We are asking an underfunded system, from which many young black men feel alienated, to make them feel better. Or safer. Boys often carry knives to feel bigger and better and safer. They hurt and they spread hurt in this awful self-fulfilling prophesy. Lives are taken as if they have no value. But, really, are they valued? The trickle-down effects of all these cuts to services turn out to be children choking in their own blood.
A landmark decision in cases of coercive control
Coercive control is little understood, though it was criminalised in 2015. It is implicit in much domestic abuse and may not always manifest in physical violence. Victims of coercive control feel dependent, often completely isolated and deliberately made to feel as if everything is their fault. The term gaslighting is also used where women are made to feel constantly anxious and as if they are going mad. Until you have seen it up close, this mental bullying is hard to understand. Helen Walmsley-Johnson’s harrowing memoir, Look What You Made Me Do, details such a relationship. What starts as feeling like romantic intensity ends up with her having every aspect of her life controlled, from gym programmes to how she must answer the phone; and, of course, there is the physical violence. She got away. Many women don’t.
Stephen Gane has just been sent to prison for four years and three months for driving his partner Kellie Sutton to suicide. This a landmark case. He throttled her, but his relentless bullying, repeated accusations of her of cheating on him, searching her bedroom all the time, sniffing her underwear for “evidence” all took its toll. Her mother told the court: “He made her feel worthless and unloved.”
In court, his defence described the relationship as “volatile”. Such relationships are seen as just excessive romance, or as somehow so passionate that these men want to destroy the person they claim to love too much.
Why don’t women just leave, is the question so often asked. At the weekend, I interviewed the MP Jess Phillips, who worked for Women’s Aid, and asked her about this. Unless women know they will get support, she said, they often feel leaving an abusive relationship will be even more dangerous for them and their children. They think they will be killed. As this case sadly shows, though, there is more than one way of taking a life.
Paul Hollywood’s Summer lovin’
He is quite a one, that Paul Hollywood. Remember when he was shocked to have caused offence by dressing as a Nazi? Well, now he has somehow managed to top it by getting off with a 22-year-old while organising his wife’s birthday bash. Is there no end to this man’s class? Summer Monteys-Fullam, though, sounds even younger: “I am truly a lucky girl and have the best things and people and animals around me 2018”, she wrote. Animals? Summer, who also claims he has turned her from a girl to a woman, reveals that her term of endearment for him is “Cake Cake”. Oh, you could do so much better, Summer – the spray-tanned dough-kneader is Fake Bake, surely.
