Changing the narrative on youth violence and knife crime: turning evidence from young people into policy change

The Knife Angel sculpture, made from over 100,000 seized blades. Photo credit: Ian Livesey.

Rachel Seabrook

Throughout the Labour Party’s 2024 general election campaign, tackling antisocial behaviour and youth violence were central themes. Amongst other commitments, Labour pledged to put 13,000 more neighbourhood police and community support officers on the beat and crack down on knife crime, including by introducing mandatory action plans for young people carrying knives, and bringing in tougher sanctions for the possession and sale of machetes, zombie knives and swords.

Now that Labour has formed a new government, these commitments will need to be enacted. But this is not the first government to take on the issue of youth violence, and with the number of knife-related incidents increasing in recent years, many will be asking if the proposed new policies will be enough. Equally, our research findings highlight the vital importance of a wider set of pledges by Labour, around schools and youth support, albeit we need more specifics on the matter of keeping children in school.

Those working at grass-roots level and within local communities will say that the narrative needs to change: that policies and practices which respond solely to incidents of criminal behaviour do little to explain why they are happening, and that understanding and addressing the root causes of why people pick up knives needs to come first.

This message is one often repeated by young people, particularly those with first-hand experience of knife crime, and it’s backed up in research evidence, too.

At a recent youth-led roundtable event hosted by the McPin Foundation and The Peace Alliance, an audience of third sector organisations, activists, researchers, with the local police force, heard from a group of young people taking part in the Peer Action Collective, a network of youth peer researchers and social action leads seeking to make their local communities a better place to live. They shared the early findings of an ongoing research project investigating the connection between youth violence, wider social inequalities, and, in particular, being excluded or suspended from school.

Through their interviews with other young people from across London, many of whom said they carried knives, they found that too often, being excluded from school made it more difficult to say no to joining gangs and taking part in antisocial behaviour. Young people shared how little they felt teachers and education practitioners understood what was going on in other aspects of their lives. Specifically, they called for more personalised approaches to exclusion and suspension practices, including a better understanding that being left out of school might leave some young people more vulnerable than others to being drawn into crime.

Recent evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study helps to build a fuller picture of contributing factors to involvement in criminal activity by young people, of which not being in school is part.

Using nationally representative data from more than 15,000 children born in the UK between 2000 and 2002, researchers found that children experiencing emotional and behavioural difficulties in primary school were more vulnerable to being excluded or suspended from secondary school, and that those who had experienced time away from school were, in turn, more likely than their peers to experience ongoing mental health problems.

Using the same study, we also know that being excluded from school between the ages of 11 and age 14, and self-harm at age 14, are both independently factors associated with reporting carrying a weapon later on in adolescence, as well as some other childhood circumstances, including low household income.

And in new analysis undertaken this year, researchers showed that carrying a weapon was in turn a risk factor for later engagement in other criminal behaviours. More specifically, those who reported carrying a weapon at age 14 were over four times more likely to engage in neighbourhood crime (defined as theft from a person, breaking and entering, or vehicle theft) by age 17, and nearly three times more likely to shoplift. Once again, earlier experiences of poor mental health, particularly self-harm, was found to be a significant risk factor for these types of crime.

It’s clear then, that weapons carrying and involvement in other criminal behaviours are strongly associated and often overlap, and that adverse experiences earlier in childhood and young people’s school career are likely to be linked.  These findings highlight and reflect the work of the Peer Action Collective, in particular that measures to reduce inequalities and ensure adequate mental health support for young people, and keep them in school, could play a role in reducing youth violence.

Research currently being undertaken by a team at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at IOE in collaboration with the Youth Endowment Fund may shed more light on preventative approaches to tackling this issue, including by investigating the potential protective power of positive childhood experiences in reducing knife crime. Results are expected in Autumn 2024.

In the meantime, one overarching message from the roundtable event was clear: that the voices of young people should be central in the conversation around youth violence, its causes, and potential solutions – and that a range of social research can facilitate this. As the government gets to work on its ambition to “take back our streets”, policymakers will want to take note.