Lynne Featherstone has written an interesting and thought provoking essay on the problem of children carrying knives elsewhere on Liberal Review - I am glad to see a prominent MP thinking carefully about this issue, and doing so on this site.

Knife carrying is undoubtedly a significant problem for the children blighted by the presence of knives on the streets and in schools. However, we should question how widespread a problem it is. The Home Office's Young people and crime: findings from the 2004 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey states the following:

CARRYING WEAPONS
… the 2004 OCJS also asked respondents whether they had carried a knife or gun in the last 12 months either for protection, for use in crimes or in case they got into a fight'. The questions did not specify the type of knife or gun carried and respondents were not asked whether they had actually used a knife or gun to either threaten or harm someone.

4 per cent of young people aged 10 to 25 said they had carried a knife of some sort in the last 12 months for protection, for use in crimes or in case they got into a fight. Less than 1 per cent said they had carried a gun of some sort for the same purpose. Although the types of knife carried are not known, early indications from the 2005 OCJS suggest that many cases involve the carrying of pen knives.

An accurate and measured assessment is that while this is an observable problem, it is not endemic. Allowing for adolescent braggadocio, these are figures for concern but probably not for widespread worry. Of course, the figures say nothing about geographical or socio-economic distribution of knife carrying and I’d hazard to guess that where a knife culture exists the problems will be magnified. The OCJS goes on to state:

Males were significantly more likely to have carried a knife and a gun than females. Carrying of knives was most common among 14 to 21 year-olds (6%). Carrying guns was rare for all age groups.

Note that carrying guns is rare. Note below that carrying weapons is more common than the use of weapons, and that excluded children are more likely to have used a weapon against another person than the average in mainstream schools.

The annual Youth Survey conducted on behalf of the Youth Justice Board asks detailed questions about weapon carrying among children aged 11 to 16 in school and excluded
young people aged 10 to 16 …The 2004 survey reported:

Although a substantial proportion of children had carried or used a weapon (defined as ‘something like a gun or a knife’) most had only carried a pen knife which could be used for a variety of innocent purposes.

Actual levels of use of a weapon were far lower than carrying. Three per cent of children in mainstream schools said they had used a weapon of some sort against another person at some time. The figure for excluded children was higher at 14 per cent.

Lynne suggests a number of solutions, which I’m going to explore one by one. First up she suggests:

So - as with drunk driving - a hard hitting campaign about the consequences of carrying a knife both for the victim and the aggressor can make an impact over time. It's about education about the realities; face-to-face work with the families or survivors of knifings - so consequences are faced.

This may or may not work. There are a couple of fundamental differences between boozy adult drivers, and frightened insecure children. Some are obvious, but some not so. The first is that children may well react differently to shock campaigns. Some children may be indifferent, or consciously reject the concerns of adults. For others, a widespread campaign highlighting the dangers of knife carrying may actually increase the insecurity that drives children to carry knives in the first place. Lynne herself states:

First - kids are afraid that without one they will be vulnerable to others with knives.

We need to be careful we send out the correct message about how widespread the problem is. Though knives are a problem, the vast majority of schoolchildren go through life without being affected by them. Ramp up the tension and more children may decide that they need to protect themselves.

Secondly, as the survey evidence suggests, most knives are pen-knives which have an entirely innocent and functional use. Even those children who may carry them as protection mostly do not use them and probably never intend to use them. As such they may not consider that they are the target of “hard-hitting� campaigns. Again, as Lynne says:

Most of them carry and don't intend to use - but it happens and they 'plunge' and that's it.

There is a fine line to tread with regard to this. Education is often a good solution to problems of ignorance – but do we do children discredit by imagining that they do not know that knives are fearful and destructive? On this point I remain agnostic.

The second solution that Lynne presents is:

We also should have equal sentencing for carrying a knife as carrying a gun - but simple locking away on its own can just shield young people from the reality of their actions, and so doesn't help reduce the reoffending rate when they're released.

The idea of having the same sentence for carrying a knife as carrying a gun should be resisted simply because they are not directly comparable offences, and they are not the same weapon. Knives have many purposes; guns only to kill. Knives require proximity to use; guns are more remote – and much more deadly. There would also something faintly absurd in demanding that a school-boy carrying a pen-knife (once the thing of every boy’s trouser pockets!) would be culpable for a misdemeanour ranked the same as carrying a gun. In the same vein, I’d make the judgement that carrying knife might not automatically lead to a custodial sentence, while carrying a gun always should lead to a custodial sentence.

Secondly, by equalising the tariff for carrying a knife with carrying a gun I suspect that for those who are minded to carry a weapon, guns will increasingly be the weapon of choice. That is, inasmuch as what is carried (or not carried) is subject to the influence of the deterrent effect of a punitive tariff, an equal tariff will marginally encourage the carrying of the weapon that is most likely to “give status�, since the negative effects of carrying such a weapon are now equal with the alternative. [This argument is only marginal because there are other determinants of what weapon is carried, as opposed to whether to carry a weapon in the first place – cost, ease of acquisition, ease of concealment and so on.] What the OCJS is also clear about is that children do not think that they will be caught if they offend; it is therefore questionable whether higher tariffs act as effective deterrents in any event.

Where I think Lynne is absolutely right is in suggesting that detection may be the key to dissuasion:

Next - take away the relative security that young people feel about not being caught carrying a knife. Random metal detector arches going into key places - out of the blue. Has to be random - in timing and placement. I'm against permanent arches in places like schools as that brutalises children and they would just leave them elsewhere anyway. But if that sense of not being caught could be removed - and it becomes too dodgy to carry - the less they will carry.

I have absolutely no idea whether such mobile arches are viable or – out and about - legal, but I strongly suspect that permanent security checks in schools are a more effective way of ensuring the knives – and guns – are not a part of school life for any of our children. And yet Lynne rejects this.

I see no problem in children “leaving weapons elsewhere� – this would be, after all, an improvement of sorts. And would such checks really brutalise children? After all, what is brutal about airport security checks? Okay, they are not convenient; they are just one of those things – but brutalising? Such checks are much more likely to be considered as invasive and worrying if they are random, unusual, out of the ordinary. If they are an everyday feature of school life they will be considered no different to going through security before a flight, having your bag checked at a sporting event, or going through the security gates used by every public library to ensure you haven’t accidentally packed away a book without taking it out, or the same systems used by shops to prevent shoplifting. It is important to stress again, that for most children such security checks will never be an issue – because they do not carry weapons.

I find myself at the end of this with one last nagging thought, that I began with … how much of a problem is this? If it is a serious problem then is deserves significant attention – to act on, and perhaps, to go beyond what Lynne has already suggested. But is there a danger that in pandering to overblown concerns relating to risk assessment and the dangers to children that we feed the feed the hobgoblin that afflicts our times perhaps more than ever - and on this issue, my mind is not made up...

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." – H.L. Mencken.