The UK government has admitted that there has been a soaring rise in cases of knife crime over the last few years. Sadly, the victims, as well as the perpetrators, are often young teenagers. A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary highlighted the issue with the chilling statistic that there has been a 93% increase in the number of stabbings of children under 16 in the last five years. This week, the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, acknowledged that the solution was not simple and would need to be tackled on various fronts. The focus, however, was on law enforcement and related preventative measures.
Perhaps Mr. Javid did not want to step on the toes of Mr. Damian Hinds, the Education Minister, by dwelling on education, but education is, in fact, the crucial hub of the matter, whether he can see it or not. Law enforcement is to public order, what vitamin C is to a cold: it can help prevent it and it can contain it, but if people are scantily dressed and poorly fed in cold weather, the epidemic will persist. Law enforcement is getting easier as big brother becomes BIGGER. We are probably not far from a society whose citizens will not be able to break the law without a high chance of getting caught. Wonderful! But what sort of citizens will they be? A society that is forced to live within certain perimeters, because of the electrified fence that the law would have become, could be a society rotten to the core. Such a society will no doubt give rise to corrupt legislators and we all know that law and justice do not always go hand in hand. So, rather than build a hell on earth, we should start focussing on what defines our higher attributes: justice, fairness, cooperation, creativity and harmony.
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