By Eric King-
The Home Secretary has today announced two new initiatives to steer vulnerable young people away from a life of serious violence,but is it enough?
Chairing the latest Serious Violence Taskforce, Sajid Javid has set out further details of a new youth advocates programme that will see respected members of communities, such as sport coaches and youth workers, receive specialist training in order to have safe conversations with young people and provide them positive alternatives to carrying a knife. How specialist the training will be is a matter of judgement and outcomes, but the training will need to be top notch. Knife crime among youths in Britain is becoming so bad that a novel approach is required to effectively tackle knife crime in Britain.
Mr. Javid also announced the next stage of the #knifefree advertising campaign which features real life stories of youth who have turned away from a life of crime thanks to a mentor in their community. These stories will play a role in influencing young people away from knife crime, but it can’t be enough to achieve the wider aims. The Home Secretary plans to use respected members of society to have safe discussions with young people, but it depends how much ground those conversations cover. How effective they are is crucial, otherwise successive governments will continue to pursue ineffective programs to tackle knife crime.
With so many young lives being lost, communication with young people needs to touch them much deeper than has ever been done before. It cannot be enough to address the epidemic of knife crime violence killing our youngsters. Understanding and addressing the complex root causes of knife crime is the only way forward, and this will be a challenging process. The best collection of individuals can fail in their mission to influence young people, if it the approach is not sufficient.
Children being born into families where there is no father for example, puts them at a huge disadvantage, especially where they feel their mother can barely support them. When many of such children or families live in the same type of neighbourhood, they become vulnerable to the same types of influences and suffer from the same lack of ambition and role models. The efforts made by the Department Of Education to spread high standard schooling could help if disadvantaged pupils in poor areas benefit from the extra push to receive very good or outstanding secondary education.
Home Secretary, Sajid Javid said:
”Intervening early in the lives of vulnerable youngsters is key in combating the rise of serious violence.
It’s therefore vital that we communicate with them directly through the people in their communities who they respect and listen to. That’s why the grassroots advocates programme and our #knifefree campaign are integral to the work we are doing to stop this bloodshed.
The new youth advocates programme is running in London and Manchester, and provides local role models expert training on skills such as safeguarding, diffusing conflict and substance misuse, this will help them spot warning signs and give guidance on how to cope in challenging situations.The youth advocates in London, who work in key community focal points such as boxing clubs, youth centres and schools, have already started to receive specific training. The programme in Manchester will start in the next few weeks.
To support the advocates conversations with young people, new #knifefree adverts will run in key London and Manchester areas. These will tell the real stories of young people portrayed by actors of why and how they stopped carrying knives – inspiring others to live knife free.
Members of the task force were also shown a preview of the new #knifefree video. They were also updated on a new collaboration with youth channel SBTV which saw four YouTube videos go live on Sunday. The videos were filmed across the UK and show music artists speaking to young people from their area about why and how they are both knife free.
These use popular music artists, such as Bugzy Malone, who has almost 1 million Instagram followers, to amplify the #knifefree campaign and directly reach young people and inspire them to live knife free.
The #knifefree media campaign – which aims to educate 10-21 year olds on the dangers of carrying knives – is one of the 61 commitments in the Serious Violence Strategy which stresses the importance of early intervention to tackle the root causes of violent crime and provide young people with the skills and resilience to lead productive lives free from violence.
The strategy sets out the importance of a multi-agency approach to tackling serious violence which involves a range of partners and agencies. Building on this, on 2 October the Home Secretary announced further measures including a new £200 million youth endowment fund, an independent review of drug misuse and a consultation on a new legal duty to underpin a multi-agency preventative or ‘public health’ approach to tackling serious violence”.
Early intervention in the lives of young people must be broad and comprehensive in its approach, and include explaining fully all the factors that contribute to young people becoming caught up in knife crime. This may also require bringing in sociologists to educate very young children in primary schools about the socio economic and family structure issues that contributes to street delinquency, so that they do their best to avoid these pitfalls. Battling knife crime is one of the greatest challenges that faces the British public today.