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Why are so many youths now taking the step from fighting one another over the local park to killing one another with knives. I don't buy the whole poverty argument, nor do I sympathise with the whole 'alienation' one. But something is going on that seems very different to what's taken place in recent times. I can honestly say that, growing up in what is now a particular problem area regarding youth-related knife crime, that I honestly never knew of a single incident in which a kid was stabbed by another kid.
I was in a cab today where the driver told me that his teenaged son had just been stabbed outside of his school. This took place in the relatively suburban, quiet area of Raynes Park. The cab driver was roughly my age and so the conversation inevitably descended into the usual 'not in my day' pattern. And yet I consider myself quite a rational and sceptical soul, not given over easily to flights of nostalgia. And yet, in this instance, I feel that something has changed within the mindset of large sections of today's youth. I just don't know why or how.
It's easy and counterproductive to blow all of this out of proportion, but equally it's convenient, naive, and in the end dangerous to brush it aside and pretend that something isn't taking place.
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