Cuts on our children's faces from knife crime are undeniably caused by cuts to youth services

Cuts kill every day. Young people are dying needlessly due to knife crime. The stories online and in the press tell of a familiar but transient tragedy, rarely exposing the story that led to such an end, saying nothing about the lives of the victim or the perpetrator, but the pain lives on in the shattered lives of their loved ones. Too many of us just accept it, shake our heads at the waste of it all, bemoan the aggressive masculinity that affects our children and move on. Some just blame the police as if they have the power or resources to change all this. 

All of us need to come up short here.  

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What we are seeing are dead children, young people scarred physically and emotionally for life. We see London’s so long-deprived communities despair. These communities, usually so good at finding hope among the inequalities and social injustice they experience every day, find it hard to believe anymore even when those who do care most speak out.  When they hear our prime minister speak of a moral mission to change the way things are, when the hear powerful celebrity voices, so well-meaning, they still need convincing that these voices carry hope. Hope is found in action. 

So, we want to raise the level of sound around these issues. Our new knife crime poster campaign points the finger firmly at inaction. They highlight huge historic cuts, to education, to the NHS, to mental health services and most of all to our youth services. The carefully curated images you see around London now highlight these cuts both physical and financial. 

The apologetic mantra that even those most affected find themselves uttering, is that ‘there is no more money’. That is of course not completely true. It’s a question of priorities. If you want to improve a business, you invest time, money and effort. Anyone in business will tell you that. If you want to change lives you invest in their futures. What is our future? Well, it’s our young people isn’t it. We have nothing without them becoming the best they can be. So many of these young people from our deprived communities have a huge capacity for innovation, and if given the chance can show their worth. But policy has cut them down to size. Cut, cut, cut! The active and deliberate erosion of investment we have seen in those young lives, who represent nothing less than our future, has been one of the gravest social crimes of this century. It must stop now. Priorities for the distribution of the nation’s tax receipts needs to be re-assessed in a national discussion with that future and those lives in mind.   

So the cuts on those faces you see in the posters now in or streets, are just what we have done to our children.  

We have scarred them physically and mentally when their futures could be so much brighter. We have withdrawn investment and now reap the whirlwind. Show them respect and they will largely show respect to the rest of us. The saving to the quality of all our lives will be so much greater than the sum of the cost involved in redesigning our social priorities.  

Our trauma surgeons, doctors and nurses should not need to tend the avoidably wounded. Think of how much better our police could be if they had the spare capacity to investigate and bring a more confident calm to our streets instead of being in the front line of enmity. Think of our mental health services, and consider the simple truth that the aspirations or every one of us could be changed if we just respected our young people more. Think how our schools could become so much more the centres of learning they should be.  

So many of us working in the field of youth empowerment try to increase the level of noise about injustice, but so much more than that is needed. What we see is that after so many years nothing that really works to end these violent attacks has been achieved. So many work tirelessly with young people, changing individual lives for the better, and restoring hope, but meanwhile lives continue to be lost, and attacks continue to rise.  

We can’t accept it. We must “cut it out”. That is why we have supported this poster campaign in London, the original brainchild of vital young minds from the major advertising agency TBWA/MCR, working with Fighting Knife Crime London to help to change the politics that drives our present priorities. And TBWA/MCR are funding for free. They are an example to every business in the country, every philanthropist and everyone in a position to help. There are so many more businesses that could contribute more to the communities they serve and who provide their work force. Those that do this know that they benefit in turn. 

Yes, it is difficult, and hard choices need to be made. Cuts are rarely the answer, but investment must be, where the stakes are as high as they are here. Youth hubs are part of it but very far from being enough if things are going to change. We need to induce a change in the hearts, minds and understanding of our communities, our businesses and our political leaders of all stripes. Kindness, renewed hope, and investment in our young is the best harbinger of peace for the future, and something we all heartily hope for.  

A bean-counter will count the beans and ignore the seeds. A farmer will first enrich the soil, plant his beans and seeds, tend them, and watch them grow. Over time each one will produce many more and feed the hungry souls so long deprived.  

Bruce Houlder is the founder of Fighting Knife Crime London.

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