When DCS Sean Yates, Scotland Yard’s head of knife crime, called for children as young as five to be taught about knives, many may have felt the country had reached new lows. Is the problem really so extensive, that we need to expose every five year old to its horrors?
At the Ben Kinsella Trust, we have been delivering anti-knife crime workshops to schools since 2012. These workshops are aimed at 10-year olds and upwards, as children move from primary to secondary school. We don’t believe we need to extend these workshops to children as young as five. We don’t want to scare children by making their world seem unsafe. The preferred approach is similar to that used when teaching children about “stranger danger”, alerting them to the possibility of risk without scaring them unnecessarily.
But as a country, we do need to do far more to support young teens, and the teachers of very young children, who are left to their own devices when a knife-related incident happens in or around the school. One London teacher told us how she struggled to help her year one class when the sibling of a pupil was the victim of knife crime. The next day at school, it was all that child, and many others in the class, were talking about. At a staff briefing, the teachers were told there was no advice, no resources to use but that they should reassure the children in their care. She was left frustrated they couldn’t do more. She felt keenly that they needed to address the ongoing problem, tackle misconceptions and talk about knife crime in the community. Sadly, she wasn’t equipped to and didn’t feel confident enough to develop something worthwhile herself.
This isn’t an isolated case. The trust gets regular requests for help from teachers who are struggling to put together a class exercise to help very young children work through an incident, where a pupil’s sibling has been injured, or they have witnessed an attack.
In many ways, Scotland is outperforming England and Wales in tackling knife crime. Of the 35 deaths of young people in Britain in 2017, none were in Scotland. Yet 12 years ago, a United Nations report found Scotland had the second highest murder rate in Europe – Scots were three times more likely to be murdered than people in England and Wales. Part of the approach to tackle knife crime has been fought in Scottish schools. The charity No Knives Better Lives, which is funded by the Scottish government, has produced a resource pack for working with children from year six (10 and 11 year olds) and above. It focuses on teaching younger children about responsibility, risk and consequence, resilience and reassurance, using role play. The authors recommend that knife crime is included only if there have been recent incidents that might have affected the class. This is to prevent creating inappropriate anxieties, which can increase the likelihood of children and young people carrying knives for protection.
To roll this out across the UK, funding is urgently required to make similar resources available for teachers who need to answer the questions of, and offer guidance to, very young children affected by this terrible epidemic. As a charity, we believe this approach balances keeping children safe with preserving their childhood.
The Children’s Commissioner has called the transition from primary to secondary school a social media “cliff edge”. I’d argue it’s also a vital time to teach them about knife crime. In my opinion, the critical age for imbedding key messages on knife crime and violence is 11, 12 and 13 years old. . We see a huge transformation in children who visit our workshops over these years, the confident and assured children in year six soon become the scared and worried year seven and eights. Their concerns are real. Our data shows (pdf) that one in seven 13-year-olds claim to know someone who regularly carries a knife. Police statistics and hospital admission data also show a massive jump in knife incidents from children aged 12 and up.
It is now – thankfully – widely acknowledged by the police and politicians alike that we can’t simple arrest our way out of this situation. But the country is not doing enough to educate young teens about the danger of knife crime and violence, or to divert those at risk into more positive activities. Too often as a nation, we wait until a young teen is excluded from school or enters the criminal justice system before acting. If we are serious about reducing knife crime, the government needs to put funding place so that all young teens are made aware of the risks and consequences of their actions and all are supported in making positive choices.
- Pat Green is the chief executive of the Ben Kinsella Trust.
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