We need to talk about serious youth violence

This week, polic­ing min­is­ter Chris Philp announced a new oper­a­tion set to lead to ​‘thou­sands of arrests’ in the name of tack­ling so-called knife crime. It should be clear to every­one by now that these kinds of ​‘crack­downs’ don’t work – and ramp­ing up polic­ing only serves to harm mar­gin­alised com­mu­ni­ties – par­tic­u­lar­ly young Black men and boys. Despite this, politi­cians from both major par­ties are only increas­ing the harm­ful rhetoric around vio­lence and crime. 

This esca­lat­ing rhetoric – and the cor­re­spond­ing increase in harm to our com­mu­ni­ties – is why a coali­tion of grass­roots groups and cam­paign­ing organ­i­sa­tions recent­ly launched ​‘Hold­ing Our Own’. The report is an urgent inter­ven­tion that builds on decades of work by organ­is­ers and activists call­ing for non-polic­ing solu­tions to what gets called ​‘seri­ous youth vio­lence’. With­in it, we show that over­polic­ing is cov­er­ing up a fail­ure to tack­le the root caus­es of social issues, like pover­ty and inequal­i­ty – and that young peo­ple are being harmed and dying as a result. 

But while we call for alter­na­tive solu­tions to vio­lence and harm, it’s also cru­cial that we don’t take the idea of ​‘seri­ous youth vio­lence’ for granted. 

The gov­ern­ment, the oppo­si­tion, polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, main­stream media all per­pet­u­ate a nar­ra­tive about seri­ous youth vio­lence – one that is racist and igno­rant of its root caus­es, and also a delib­er­ate mis­read­ing, mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion and manip­u­la­tion of the evi­dence sur­round­ing the issue. For years, activists and aca­d­e­mics like Stu­art Hall, Tot­ten­ham Rights, Avi­ah Day and Shan­ice McBean have been uncov­er­ing the ways in which crime sta­tis­tics have been man­u­fac­tured to cre­ate a moral pan­ic about ris­ing lev­els of crime. In ​‘Polic­ing the Cri­sis,’ his study of the pan­ic around ​‘mug­ging’ in the 1970s, Hall wrote: ​‘sta­tis­tics — whether crime rates or opin­ion polls — have an ide­o­log­i­cal func­tion: they appear to ground free float­ing and con­tro­ver­sial impres­sions in the hard, incon­tro­vert­ible soil of numbers.’ 

For our part, NGOs like Lib­er­ty aren’t inno­cent either. Even with the best inten­tions, organ­i­sa­tions work­ing in crim­i­nal jus­tice, youth jus­tice, and human rights have tak­en the cat­e­go­ry of knife crime as fact. While work­ing on the Hold­ing Our Own project, the fear of con­tribut­ing to the prob­lem lit­er­al­ly kept me up at night – by using the lan­guage of ​‘seri­ous youth vio­lence’, how much do we risk fail­ing to chal­lenge the assump­tions that lan­guage car­ries — and there­by per­pet­u­at­ing the racist dis­course that sur­rounds it?

Seri­ous youth vio­lence plays a spe­cif­ic role in polic­ing and the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem – but also in the imag­i­na­tions of the pub­lic. By tap­ping into people’s fears (pre­dom­i­nant­ly of the white, mid­dle class­es – in our cities and beyond), and defin­ing ​‘safe­ty’ as safe­ty from ​‘thugs’ (and we all know the racialised and classed nar­ra­tives that under­pin such terms), those who push polic­ing as a response to harm can paint any­one argu­ing for alter­na­tives as part of the prob­lem – as under­min­ing the real­i­ty of what hap­pens when a young per­son is mur­dered or crit­i­cal­ly injured.

That could not be fur­ther from the truth. We recog­nise the harm that many young peo­ple are fac­ing today as a human rights issue – and the fail­ure of the gov­ern­ment to tack­le its root caus­es as an abuse of chil­dren and young people’s human rights. But we are clear that ulti­mate­ly this harm is per­pet­u­at­ed by the state: by the police, and by gov­ern­ment neglect. 

And let’s be clear about some­thing else: those per­pet­u­at­ing the racist knife crime nar­ra­tive do not care actu­al­ly care about seri­ous youth vio­lence, about the over­polic­ing of black and work­ing class com­mu­ni­ties, or the con­di­tions that con­tribute to inter­per­son­al vio­lence and soci­etal inequality. 

Instead, seri­ous youth vio­lence is used as a tool used to jus­ti­fy the polic­ing of pre­dom­i­nant­ly black com­mu­ni­ties – from the prac­tice of stop and search, to the use of dan­ger­ous weapons like TASER – and as a way of divert­ing atten­tion from the government’s chron­ic and fatal neglect of our communities. 

In the Hold­ing Our Own report, we’ve tried to artic­u­late all of this stick­i­ness: that what gets called seri­ous youth vio­lence is a social con­struct; and that, at the same time, young peo­ple are being harmed and even dying – and suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments have wors­ened the issue rather than tack­ling its root caus­es. We’ve also tried to grap­ple with the ten­sions: that as an issue, seri­ous youth vio­lence is laid at the feet of young black and work­ing class boys – mak­ing it hard to dis­en­tan­gle the harm­ful nar­ra­tive about knife crime from issues of race. 

We know there are no easy answers. But there are bold alter­na­tives that we know work. It’s high time that we stop pre­tend­ing that we can police our way out of social issues, stop using young black boys as polit­i­cal fod­der to jus­ti­fy harm­ful polic­ing prac­tices, and start giv­ing com­mu­ni­ties the things they real­ly need to live healthy, ful­fill­ing lives.

The demands in the Hold­ing Our Own report are life-affirm­ing – from build­ing an edu­ca­tion sys­tem based on care and sup­port, to invest­ing in the knowl­edge and skills in our com­mu­ni­ties. They cen­tre Black joy, friend­ship and cre­ativ­i­ty, and the hope­ful­ness that can come when we work togeth­er to imag­ine and cam­paign on a plat­form of dis­man­tling oppres­sive insti­tu­tions, and build­ing path­ways for rad­i­cal change, ground­ed in com­mu­ni­ty care, heal­ing jus­tice, and love.

Emmanuelle Andrews is Pol­i­cy and Cam­paigns Man­ag­er for Lib­er­ty and a co-author of the Hold­ing Our Own report. 

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