case study on knife crime

• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 25 September 2020

Risk factors associated with knife-crime in United Kingdom among young people aged 10–24 years: a systematic review

• Sara Haylock   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7650-7527 1 ,
• Talia Boshari 1 , 2 ,
• Emma C. Alexander 3 , 4 ,
• Ameeta Kumar 5 ,
• Logan Manikam 4 , 6 &
• Richard Pinder 1 , 2  

BMC Public Health volume  20 , Article number:  1451 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Since 2013, the number of violent crimes and offences by sharp instruments have increased continually, following a previous decrease, with majority of cases occurring among young people and in London. There is limited understanding surrounding the drivers influencing this change in trends, with mostly American-based research identifying risk factors.

The aim of this review is to identify and synthesise evidence from a range of literature to identify risk factors associated with weapon-related crime, for young people (aged 10–24 years) within the UK.

A search strategy was generated to conduct a systematic search of published and grey literature within four databases (EMBASE, Medline, PsycINFO, and OpenGrey), identifying papers within a UK-context. Abstracts and full texts were screened by two independent reviewers to assess eligibility for inclusion, namely study focus in line with the objectives of the review. Weight of Evidence approach was utilised to assess paper quality, resulting in inclusion of 16 papers. Thematic analysis was conducted for studies to identity and categorise risk factors according to the WHO ecological model.

No association was found between gender or ethnicity and youth violence, contrasting current understanding shown within media. Multiple research papers identified adverse childhood experiences and poor mental health as positively associated with youth and gang violence. It was suggested that community and societal risk factors, such as discrimination and economic inequality, were frequently linked to youth violence.

A small number of studies were included within the review as this is a growing field of research, which may have led to a constrained number of risk factors identified. Due to heterogeneity of studies, a meta-analysis could not be conducted. As many studies displayed positive results, publication bias may be present.

Conclusions

Several risk factors were identified, with evidence currently heterogeneous with minimal high-quality studies. However, findings highlight key areas for future research, including the link between poor mental health and knife-crime, and the trajectory into gangs. Risk factors should help identify high-risk individuals, targeting them within mitigation strategies to prevent involvement within crime. This should contribute to efforts aimed at reducing the rising crime rates within UK.

Systematic review registration number

CRD42019138545 .

Registered at PROSPSERO: 16/08/2019.

Peer Review reports

Youth violence, as defined in Fig. 1 , has been increasing globally resulting in substantial economic, social, and psychological costs. Globally interpersonal violence and homicide is the third leading cause of death for 15–19 year olds [ 1 ] and although during the 49th World Health Assembly this was declared as a major, worldwide, and increasing issue, strategies aimed to reduce youth violence are yet to be prioritised and implemented.

Definitions of key terms mentioned within the review

Youth violence is a particularly pertinent issue in the United Kingdom. According to police-recorded data, the United Kingdom (UK) has seen increasing incidence of youth violence since 2012/13 [ 2 ], contrasting with a preceding period of improvement observed globally over the years 2000–12 [ 3 ]. A significant trend has been the rise in weapon-related crime, with 285 homicides committed involving a knife or sharp instrument in year ending March 2018 - an increase of 70 offences compared to the previous year [ 1 ]. Recent data from the Office for National Statistics revealed an 16% increase in the number of offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in the year ending March 2018 ( n  = 40,147). This figure is suspected to underestimate the actual number of incidents due to issues of record identification from the Greater Manchester Police. Furthermore, in 2017, the most common form of homicide was by sharp instrument with 39,598 offences (a 22% increase since 2016 and 55% increase since 2014) [ 4 ].

A large number of young people involved in violence are dying as a result of sharp instruments. Data also shows young people are disproportionately affected by weapon-related crime. The number of homicide victims for the age group 0–24 years is consistently the highest and continues to increase in contrast to all other age groups (excluding 35–44 years) which have remained stable [ 2 ]. Similar trends have been observed regarding weapon possession, specifically ‘articles with a blade or point’ [ 4 ]. This has resulted in a 55% rise in the number of hospital admissions involving young people in England for assaults involving a sharp instrument since 2012/13 [ 5 ], therefore displaying the impact on health services, individuals, and the wider community.

Location also seems to influence this public health issue. For example, London accounts for 48% of the increase in weapon-related crime [ 2 ] and recent data also displays a contrast of the number of offences between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. This variability may reflect disparities in socioeconomic status, education, availability of weapons, and crime levels. For example, deprivation is shown to contribute to violent crime, as risk of victimisation of those unemployed is double the national average and homicide offenders are most likely to have low socioeconomic status (SES) [ 6 ].

Gang violence has received significant attention within the media and is often described as the driving factor behind the rise in knife crime in London [ 7 ]. In 2007/08, 55 young people aged 13–19 years died in violent circumstances and according to MPS more than half of these were gang-related [ 8 ]. In early 2019, media reports of stabbings and homicides increased dramatically, creating confusion surrounding gangs and their characteristics. For example, in March BBC News reported 5 gang members were arrested for knife crime within a school [ 9 ]. Also, young males of ethnic minority groups, such as African-Caribbean, along with immigrants and asylum seekers are described as causing the majority of youth violence [ 10 ], although associations are yet to be investigated.

Gangs are not wholly responsible for this recent surge in youth violence and the contribution by gangs is difficult to quantify as there is no precise or legal definition of a ‘gang’. Although similarities exist between two commonly used definitions - displayed in figure one – there are clear differences. The link between gang violence and violent crime requires further investigation.

Despite the rising tide of weapon-related crime, minimal research has been conducted within a UK-context with the majority of research, displayed by the WHO, guiding mitigation strategies based on American gangs and associated violence. The social and legal context of these two countries differ, particularly around availability and use of firearms. Therefore, this research has limited use [ 11 ]. Multiple risk factors have been identified, including but not limited to: race, gender, gang membership, deprivation, social media, and adverse childhood experiences (ACE). However, risk factors lack clarity, are yet to be collectively analysed, and require a systematic assessment and evaluation.

Research question

What are the risk and protective factors relating to the rise in knife crime associated with weapon carrying, weapon usage, homicides, gang involvement, or victimisation of weapon-related crime, for young people (aged 10–24 years) within the UK?

The aim of this systematic review is to identify and synthesise evidence from a wide range of literature to identify risk or protective factors associated with weapon carrying, weapon usage, homicides, gang involvement, or victimisation of weapon-related crime, for young people (aged 10–24 years) within the UK.

There has been a clear and consistent rise in police-recorded incidents involving a knife or sharp instrument in the UK since 2014 [ 5 ], with weapon-crime described as a new epidemic [ 12 ]. This challenge requires a holistic approach and Public Health would provide a central role in characterising responses and providing leadership. Relying entirely on law enforcement would be inefficient. However, the complexity of weapon-related crime and associated risk factors is not completely understood as minimal research has investigated these risk factors within a UK setting. This lack of research has led to misleading media reporting and no consistent or strategic approach to tackle this growing problem. Through identifying common risk factors, interventions can be aimed at those vulnerable to future involvement within violent crime, acting as a preventative method. Differences between gang members and non-gang youths also need to be highlighted as this may help inform timely interventions, reaching youths before they engage in gang activities.

This review focuses exclusively on young people aged 10–24 years given the significant increase in victimisation and involvement within violent crimes compared to any other age group, introduced previously [ 4 , 12 ].

This systematic review is the first paper to combine information, from published literature, of youth violence and associated risk factors within a UK context. This paper aims to provide essential evidence, directing future interventions to effectively reduce weapon-related crime and understanding the trajectory of individuals into violent crime and - in some cases - gang membership.

The protocol is registered to PROSPERO (CRD42019138545, https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/ ) and is reported according to PRISMA guidelines.

Search strategy

A research phase enabled the development of search terms (Fig. 2 ), specific to study setting, which were entered into EMBASE, Medline, and PsycINFO. Keywords from each term were combined to further narrow results, ensuring relevant articles were identified, for example searching ‘adolescent’ AND ‘knife crime’ AND ‘United Kingdom’. Using terms such as ‘youth violence’ and ‘knife crime’, a search was performed on the database OpenGrey to include grey literature, thus investigating information beyond published articles. There was limited capability to form a structured search on OpenGrey, therefore a search string similar to the search strategy used for research databases was not possible. English was set as a language limit, removing articles without translation available. An example search strategy can be found in Appendix A .

Search strategy used to identify papers within academic databases. Full search strategies can be available from authors on request.

Inclusion criteria

Papers were included within the review if they met the following criteria, ensuring risk factors were specifically associated with weapon-related crime within the UK:

Paper identified risk or protective factors associated with weapon carrying, weapon usage, homicides, gang involvement, or victimisation of weapon-related crime;

Study participants included young people (aged 10–24 years);

Article setting was within United Kingdom;

The paper was a form of published paper, grey literature, conference abstract, or unpublished thesis.

Articles were excluded if:

Population did not look specifically at young people (aged 10–24 years);

Papers identified risk factors associated with sexual violence or other violent/victim-based crime (as the review focuses on risk factors associated with crime involving knives or sharp instruments and not associated with any other crime);

Papers identified special education needs/drug or alcohol misuse as risk factors as these associations have already been well-reported throughout previous research;

English translation was not available;

Papers were published prior 1990 in order to ensure relevance.

Study selection, data extraction and analysis

A two-stage screening process was conducted, identifying articles eligible for study involvement. Initially, titles and abstracts were reviewed independently by two reviewers and, if meeting inclusion criteria, articles were deemed eligible for the second phase of screening. Full texts were assessed against criteria to evaluate whether papers were suitable for study inclusion. Any discrepancies in screening or data extraction were discussed until a consensus was reached.

As part of a narrative synthesis a deductive thematic analysis [ 13 ] was conducted on studies to extract and categorise risk factors, in-line with the WHO Ecological Framework, used to guide violence prevention strategies [ 14 ]. The model was generated to display the complexity of risk factors associated with interpersonal violence, and how this outcome is an interaction of factors across a variety of levels [ 14 ]. The ecological model classifies risk factors into four main groups: individual, relationships, community, and societal – each category is further broken down by the WHO, to provide a list of key variables, and are displayed in Table 2 [ 14 ]. The categories within this model were used when interpreting the review’s findings. It was expected that the majority of risk factors identified within studies would align with the WHO framework. However, certain risk factors mentioned in the model were not captured within included studies (displayed in Table 2 ). This may be a result of the limited number of studies included within the review.

During the preliminary synthesis, the thematic analysis was conducted as papers were analysed by searching for risk factors that aligned with the themes developed from the existing WHO concepts [ 14 ] (Table 2 ). This was used to identify any patterns, similarities or differences of risk factors across the included studies. When identified, the primary author coded risk factors by colour and inputted into a spreadsheet. These were then tabulated to organise, present, and count findings following the WHO framework. Paragraphs were then drafted based on the frequency that a risk factor was mentioned across the studies. For example, seven studies highlighted ‘adverse childhood experiences’ as a risk factor, therefore these results were further explained. By using pre-determined themes, this research aims to guide recommendations based on a variety of studies, ensuring results can be utilised for future public health policies.

Meta-analysis was not conducted due to study heterogeneity in methodology and focus. Heterogeneity was assessed in the included studies for: clinical heterogeneity (the varied participant groups and outcomes assessed); and methodological heterogeneity (the differing WOE scores (Table 1 ) as well as study design, and statistical tests performed). Diversity of study is portrayed in Appendix B . This contains a summary table presenting key characteristics of included studies, providing information about study design, population, outcomes, and statistical tests when appropriate. This was reported prior to the preliminary synthesis.

To assess the robustness of the narrative synthesis, the primary research articles included were quality appraised, at study level, by the primary author using the Weight of Evidence approach (WOE) [ 15 ]. This method was selected as a variety of different study designs were collected with a range of information available. This process allows for integration of evidence obtained from various results and methodologies when answering the proposed research question. This form of analysis assesses the overall quality of each paper depending on the following three criteria: WOE A (used to examine the clarity and accuracy of information); WOE B (assessing appropriateness of study methodology); and WOE C (how relevant study findings are to this systematic review). For each study, these three judgements were then combined to provide WOE D: an overall assessment of quality and relevance of evidence for risk factors associated with weapon usage and knife crime (Table 1 ). Research papers were ranked as either high (H), medium (M), or low (L) and were included only if overall quality (WOE D) rated as high or medium. These rankings were used to evaluate strength of key findings and results. Where there was uncertainty concerning study quality following the above criteria, the primary author liaised with co-authors to clarify ranking. This aimed to ensure reliability of the quality appraisal.

The Synthesis Without Meta-analysis (SWiM) guideline [ 16 ] was used to ensure clarity when reporting methods, including the narrative synthesis, and results of the review. A supplementary table outlining the checklist and where to find the reported information within the manuscript can be found in Appendix C .

A total of 2335 articles were originally identified from the initial search (PRISMA flowchart (Fig.  3 )), from which 622 duplicates were removed, resulting in 1713 articles taken forward for abstract review. Stage one review excluded a further 1665 articles and stage two, 31. Seventeen articles were included in the WOE quality assessment, where only one paper was excluded from the review with a quality ranked as low (L). Therefore, 16 articles were included in the systematic review. A quantitative analysis was not undertaken due to the heterogeneity of studies included ( Appendix B ), and therefore a narrative synthesis of risk factors influencing weapon-related crime was conducted.

PRISMA flowchart displaying the number of articles found from each database (2,335), number of duplicates removed (622), papers removed from abstract screening (1,665), and removed from full text screening (31).

Study characteristics

Of the 16 articles included, one was an intervention study evaluating current mitigation strategies for gang-related crime in London [ 8 ], while all other studies were observational. Included within the review were: three literature reviews [ 17 , 18 , 19 ]; three cohort studies [ 20 , 21 , 22 ]; three qualitative interview studies [ 8 , 23 , 24 ]; three case-control studies [ 25 , 26 , 27 ] 2017; and four cross-sectional studies [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. All studies were conducted within the UK: four within the UK; one in Birmingham; one in Edinburgh; five in London; one in Wales; and one in England. Appendix B presents detail characteristics of each study, including study size and key findings.

To provide a rich reflection of evidence for the reader, we included both quantitative and qualitative studies as there is comparatively little evidence published on this topic within the inclusion parameters specified. Deductive thematic analysis was completed for qualitative papers using themes as set-out by the WHO. Therefore, if these themes/risk factors were identified within the paper, the paper was incorporated into Table 2 irrespective of study design.

As previously mentioned, risk factors were divided into four categories, and subcategories within these, following the Ecological Framework put forward by the WHO [ 3 ]: individual; relationships; community; and societal. WHO violence risk factors not identified within included studies are also shown. Each subcategory of risk factor is discussed in the subsequent sections. As mentioned previously, a paper focusing on education and crime age profile was not included within the review due to ranking low quality [ 32 ].

Individual risk factors

Of the 16 studies included within the review, 10 investigated the association of demography with knife crime (Table 2 ). All six studies investigating age found a positive association between knife crime and adolescence [ 21 , 23 , 26 , 28 , 30 , 31 ]. A 2006 cross-sectional study, using the Juvenile Attitudes Towards Weapon Scale (derived from the Attitudes Toward Guns and Violence Questionnaire), found that the prevalence of weapon carrying increases with age: 30% for individuals aged 11–13 years, 38.2% at 14–15, 47.4% at 16–17, and 52.6% at ages 18–19 [ 30 ] (WOE = H). Regarding gang violence, three studies found a young person, compared to other age groups, is positively associated with being in a gang [ 23 , 26 , 33 ]. Densley et al (WOE = M) interviewed 69 self-described gang members, recruited from six London boroughs experiencing high levels of socioeconomic deprivation, with an age range of 13–34 (mean age 20). A participant aged 25 years described gang life to be a ‘young man’s game’ and ‘when you’re younger it’s about what you’ve got now and how fast…when you’re older you’ve got more to lose’ [ 23 ].

Results were mixed regarding the association with gender. One cohort and one cross-sectional study showed males were more likely to be associated with knife crime [ 22 , 28 ]. However, a cohort study of in care homes suggested females were more likely to offend at a younger age [ 21 ](WOE = M). A cross sectional-study looked more closely at the characteristics of weapon-carrying, e.g. type and use of weapon, and found no significant difference on the basis of gender: although 27% of males used their weapon to injure compared to 19% of females [ 30 ]. No significant association between gang violence and gender was found in the three papers exploring this issue [ 24 , 26 , 31 ]. For example, both males and females expressing the need to be the ‘biggest, baddest and the most untouchable’ [ 26 ] (WOE = M).

A cohort study found no association between knife crime and the ethnicity of the victim or perpetrator when controlling for confounders, including sex and family structure at an individual level and neighbourhood deprivation at a community level [ 17 ](WOE = M). However, a literature review suggests that migrants and refugees may be at higher risk of victimisation of weapon-related crime [ 20 ] which may explain the overrepresentation within the media. A cross-sectional study of 797 school students and a case-control with 188 young offenders completed self-reported questionnaires and, through use of pre-determined criteria, were divided into categories depending on gang involvement. Comparisons of a variety of groups, rather than investigating one specific cohort of gang members, allows for differences to be evaluated. As neither studies identified a difference between the ethnicity of groups divided by level of gang involvement, this suggests no association with gang violence [ 20 , 25 , 31 ].

Adverse childhood experiences (ACE)

All seven studies investigating the association between teenagers with ACEs and weapon-related crime reported a positive association (Table 2 ). A cross-sectional study of 20 males convicted of homicide during their adolescence investigating adolescent homicide found that 25% of perpetrators had experienced either sexual or physical abuse and 90% were known to social services [ 29 ] (WOE = M), and all 20 had previously experienced neglect or parental separation [ 29 ] ; a higher prevalence compared to the general population. Within a study based in a care home, 91% of young people who had been convicted of a crime (the majority of which were violent or weapon-enabled) had experienced multiple placements (range of 1–30, mean of 8) [ 28 ] (WOE = M). Wood J et al (WOE = H) showed in a cross-sectional study that gang members and ‘gang affiliates’ self-reported more childhood traumatic events and were more likely to have been placed in local authority care compared to violent men not in a gang [ 27 ].

Three studies investigated the impact of school exclusion on involvement in knife crime [ 19 , 21 , 29 ]. However, one study did not show a clear association between education and gang membership. During qualitative interviews current and previous gang members expressed their opinions that school achievements and successful routes through education were unattainable [ 24 ]. On the other hand, some gang members had obtained GCSEs and were still involved in criminality [ 24 ].

Clement et al identified in a Bristol-based study that 80% of younger offenders had previously been excluded from school, suggesting a link between school exclusion and involvement in violence [ 19 ]. In contrast, Hayden et al found similar rates of school exclusion between offenders and non-offenders within a care home setting (40% for non-offenders and 44% for offenders) [ 21 ]. However, as all individuals were removed from their family home this may affect the findings.

Mental health

Three studies investigated mental health associated with knife crime and both described poor mental health (suicide/depression/self-harm described by participants) as a risk factor [ 27 , 29 , 30 ]. A cross-sectional study of 20 adolescents committing homicide revealed that all participants suffered from high levels of interpersonal conflict and psychological vulnerabilities [ 29 ]. A case-control study of 1539 men found that self-identified gang members and gang affiliates had a higher prevalence of psychological issues, including anxiety, psychosis and suicide attempt, than violent men not involved in gangs [ 27 ]. For the particular study, gang affiliates and members both were involved in gang-related activity, however, categories differed as gang affiliates did not identify as a gang member.

Victimisation

Three studies investigated a link between previous victimisation of weapon-related crime and offending [ 20 , 27 , 30 ] that among young people self-reporting weapon possession within the last 6 months, ‘reactive weapon carriers’ - where weapon was used in conflict resolution, or user was a victim of threat, and/or injury - reported previously being a victim of threat or injury. Smith D et al (WOE = M) found that victims of bulling were also more likely to offend and be victims of weapon-related crime. Furthermore, gang members were more likely to be targeted as victims and self-reported more serious injuries compared to non-gang members [ 30 ]. Gang affiliates also reported more incidents involving physical attacks compared to violent men who were not part of gangs, however unexpectedly more than gang members [ 27 ]. Results found individuals who self-reported victimisation were more likely to offend and vice versa, therefore a bidirectional relationship may exist between being a perpetrator and victim of weapon-related crime.

Relationships risk factors

Seven studies reported peer influence as an important risk factor for knife crime (Table 2 ). For example, Barlas et al (WOE = H) described self-identified ‘offensive weapon carriers’ – those who carry weapons to injure or threaten – considered peer influence an important reason for weapon carrying. In conjunction with this, two studies showed peer influence as an important risk factor for gang membership [ 25 , 26 ]. A majority (65%) of self-described gang members, and 57% of self-described members who also met Eurogang definition, identified one reason for joining was ‘because a friend was a member of the group’ [ 25 ].

Two studies investigated parental relationships in association with knife crime and all identified that strong parental attachment acted as a protective factor [ 20 , 22 ]. At age 15, a cohort study found conflicts with parents increased risk of victimisation and offending [ 20 ].

Six studies included in this review investigated the impact of deprivation, all of which showed a positive association with knife crime. During interviews, Densley et al (WOE = M) concluded that areas with low socioeconomic status increase risk of gang involvement and with one interviewed gang member describing London communities as ‘built to encourage crime’ [ 23 ]. According to a literature review, crime rates are highest in areas of economic deprivation, increasing the chance of adolescents’ involvement within violent crimes [ 18 ]. Alongside this, individuals who identified as ‘defensive weapon carriers’ expressed the need to carry weapons for personal safety in high crime areas [ 30 ]. Deprivation can further result in low social cohesion which has further been associated with offending behaviour of adolescents and gang members [ 31 ].

Three studies suggested a positive impact of economic deprivation and knife crime (Table 3). Densely et al explains how economic inequalities have forced young men into ‘self-destructive behaviour’ as the societal problems have left individuals with minimal options [ 23 ]. Four studies showed a positive association between stigma and discrimination and weapon-related crime [ 8 , 23 , 25 , 31 ]. A cross-sectional study of 797 secondary school students found negative perceptions of authority were highest in gang members, followed by peripheral youth (individuals involved within gang-related activity, but not classified as members), and lowest in non-gang youth [ 31 ]. Furthermore, within interviews gang members described themselves as ‘urban outcasts’, explaining that ‘[they’re] automatically stereotyped, it’s like all black people are criminals… after a time you feel like ‘oh we a gang now? Ok we’ll show you gang’ [ 23 ].

Three studies described violence and weapon carrying as a method of gaining status, power, and masculinity [ 19 , 30 , 31 ]. For example, Barlas et al (WOE = H) found young people explained the most common reasons for weapon carrying were: ‘for looking cool’, ‘other people’s respect’, ‘feeling powerful’, and ‘peer admiration’ [ 30 ]. Within five studies, gangs were described as providing identity, status, and companionship with membership proving as a method to build an individual’s reputation [ 19 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 31 ]. For example, gang members have expressed the desire to ‘win approval from peers’ and two studies found that young gang members perceived social status as more important compared to non-gang-involved adolescents [ 19 , 30 ].

Violence is a complex issue as many risk factors are interlinked, thus determining each predictor’s overall influence difficult to characterise. However, the results of the systematic review suggest an unstable environment - within a family, community, or society setting – derived from a multitude of risk factors is a key driver for involvement in weapon-related crime. This is the first systematic review to assess a wide range of literature to identify risk factors for weapon-related crime, collating and analysing information surrounding a topical and growing public health issue.

Ethnicity and community factors

Results did not identify a strong relationship between ethnicity and youth violence when controlling for confounders, such as SES [ 20 , 25 , 31 ], which contrasts information displayed in the media. While ethnicity had no association, community and societal factors such as economic deprivation did, and these characteristics tended to correlate with certain ethnic minorities. For example, results showed migrants and refugees recently entering the UK were at higher risk of victimisation [ 17 ] – this may be a result of discrimination these individuals face when entering a new community. It has also been shown that gangs are homogenous and often mirror the demography of the community they associate with [ 31 ]. This relationship between risk factors may lead to the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities as perpetrators and victims of weapon-related crime within police-recorded data and the media.

This systematic review did not reveal a clear association between gender and youth violence. The societal pressures of males to display masculinity may provide a possible explanation for their increased threatening behaviour [ 33 ]. Research papers investigating the link between gender and weapon-related crime have shown there are multiple aspects of behaviour regarding knife crime, for example ownership, type of weapon, and use. However, due to the mixed evidence in this review alone, it is not possible to confirm this relationship or if gender is a risk factor.

Adverse childhood experiences

Seven studies identified ACEs as significant risk factors for weapon-related crime, which strongly supports the relationship between early childhood trauma and violence. It can be argued that trauma and an unstable family life create an environment which is likely to manifest aggression and poor mental health, increasing the risk of violent behaviour [ 34 ]. This coincides with previous knowledge regarding the long-term effects of traumatic childhood on health within adulthood, including economic deprivation, anxiety, and aggression [ 35 , 36 , 37 ]. Gangs may also provide a sense of security that is lacking from their family environment and, as mentioned by Public Health England, a sense of belonging which is fundamental for an individual’s social identity [ 38 ]. Furthermore, two studies highlighted the protective nature of strong parental attachment [ 20 , 22 ] which further supports the importance of a stable home environment and may counteract the effects caused by ACEs. Similar results were found in US-based studies with parental monitoring being negatively associated with gang membership, reducing the effect of other risk factors on adolescents [ 39 ].

This is further supported by the association between poor mental health and weapon-related crime, identified by Bailey et al, Barlas et al, and Clement et al. Poor mental health may be on the causal pathway from ACEs to violent behaviour as those suffering from trauma are more likely to experience poor mental health [ 36 ]. Therefore, these individuals are more likely to act aggressively and those with suicidal thoughts might not consider the repercussions of their actions.

Strengths and limitations

There is limited understanding of risk factors for weapon-related crime among young people and current knowledge of gangs has mostly been derived from research conducted within the USA, which means findings will be influenced by its environment of high gun ownership and incarceration rates. Within a growing field of research, this paper is the first to collect information from scientific and grey literature, analysing and comparing risk factors for weapon-related crime. Therefore, this review provides essential evidence on risk factors identifying which individuals are at high-risk, directing public health interventions to target those most vulnerable to effectively reduce youth violence. Results are also specific to the UK, with other reports focusing on wider regions, such as Europe, allowing for precise suggestions for mitigation.

However, findings should be balanced against a number of limitations. Only 16 studies were eligible for inclusion, which may have resulted in a constrained range of risk factors identified. However, this is a growing field of research, resulting in a limited number of sources available. Literature reviews were also included within the review and these may be affected by the authors experience or personal views, therefore these should be contextualised. A meta-analysis could not be conducted due to the heterogeneity and types of studies included within the review, therefore a statistical estimate of effect for each risk factor could not be produced. A narrative synthesis was conducted, which may have resulted in unreliability, lack of transparency, and potential reviewer bias as conclusions are based on subjective interpretation [ 40 ]. However, due to the substantial heterogeneity in populations, outcome, and methodology, a narrative synthesis was the most appropriate methodology for this review. Although we included grey literature, publication bias is likely to be present, particularly as many studies included within the review conclude positive results. Studies suggesting no association with risk factors and youth violence might by underrepresented within this review.

With regards to the studies included within the review, qualitative interviews investigating gang membership used a chain referral method to recruit participants. This would have inherent bias as only a specific group of individuals are likely to be included within the analysis, potentially only identifying the same risk factors. Self-reported questionnaires were also utilised, which may have resulted in erroneous recall. However, due to the sensitive nature of the topic, these methods may be most appropriate to ensure individuals provide honest and accurate information.

Comparison with previous literature

The identification of risk factors such as ACEs and poor mental health is in line with previous knowledge as a relationship exists between trauma and involvement within weapon-related crime. For example, multiple studies have highlighted the effect of childhood trauma on adolescent and adult health, psychological and physical [ 36 ]. Areas of high crime, violent incidents, low socioeconomic status and the relationship with youth violence have also previously been highlighted within previous worldwide research [ 3 ]. However, contrasting previous literature, no significant association was found between gender and youth violence. Reports have suggested females play secondary roles within violent crime and gang activity [ 10 ], which may suggest the characteristics of gangs are evolving and research needs updating.

Although many risk factors mentioned within this review have been previously identified, they have not yet been collectively analysed. Therefore, compared to previous literature, this review highlights the interconnected nature of risk factors for weapon-related crime and the necessity for a holistic preventative approach.

Policy implications

As no clear association was found between gender, ethnicity and weapon-related crime, policy makers should avoid targeting individuals based on stereotypes in these areas. This may also reduce discrimination within policy efforts, ensuring a holistic approach to mitigate youth violence. Individuals with ACEs and mental health issues should be targeted within prevention strategies as results suggest these groups are at high-risk for future involvement within violent crime. Thus far studies investigating this outcome have been very heterogeneous and mixed in quality, further research is necessary in order to aid the design of interventions and to aid policymakers.

To prevent individuals in areas of deprivation using violence as a method to improve social status, it is essential for policy makers to target areas of deprivation when tackling gang crime. Strategies should be aimed at improving employment skills, self-esteem, and also community involvement to increase social cohesion at a young age given the influence of ACEs, acting to prevent future formation of gangs as well as improve the quality of life for the adolescent population.

Youth violence is an increasing public health issue within the UK and London in particular. This study collected information regarding risk factors from a wide range of sources, uniquely examining them within a UK setting. The review demonstrates the importance of stability for an adolescent during times of vulnerability with each risk factor eroding this sense of security. Although it is important to recognise not all adolescents with these risk factors will commit crimes or engage in gangs or violent behaviour, the identified risk factors can act as warning signs that captures young people before they become victims of violence. This provides essential evidence on which individuals are at high-risk, directing public health interventions to target those most vulnerable to effectively reduce youth violence.

Availability of data and materials

The papers analysed within the review are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Adverse Childhood Experience

Socioeconomic status

United Kingdom

World Health Organization

Weight of Evidence

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This research was supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care Northwest London (NIHR CLAHRC NWL), now recommissioned as NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Northwest London.

Logan Manikam is Director of Aceso Global Health Consultants Limited & is also funded via a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Advanced Fellowship (Ref: NIHR300020).

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SH conducted initial research during planning stages of the review and developed the research question and inclusion criteria. SH was the primary reviewer for paper inclusion and quality assessment of papers. SH conducted the thematic analysis and narrative synthesis, interpreted results, and was the primary writer for the systematic review. TB provided help during planning of review and designing systematic review, including identifying search terms and using WHO ecological model for analysis. TB was involved in interpretation of data and helped categorise study findings into categories of the ecological model. Also contributed to multiple drafts of systematic review. EA and LM contributed to design of work and systematic review methodology, ensuring review aligns to PRISMA guidelines. EA provided WOE method for paper analysis offered second opinion when uncertain. EA also contributed to multiple drafts of the review, providing extensive feedback. AK was the second independent reviewer of papers for review inclusion, playing a key role in acquisition of studies. RP: oversaw design of the review, outlying search strategy and was involved in analysis through suggestion of thematic analysis; offered interpretations of studies and how findings should be categorised according to ecological model and contributed to drafting and editing of review throughout process. All authors have read, edited, and approved the submitted version of the systematic review.

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Copy and insert the string into the search bar. The asterisk used in the search truncates the search term so that, for instance, both ‘teen’ and ‘teens’ are retrieved.

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((((Weapon* OR Knife crime* OR Sharp Instrument* OR Stabbing* OR Knives OR Blade*OR Criminal* OR Assault* OR Homicide* OR Murder* OR weapon carrying)) AND (Youth* OR Adolescent* OR Adolescence OR teen* OR Juvenile OR Young Adult* OR Student* OR Pre$teen* OR Youngster* OR Pre$adolescent OR young person)) AND (UK OR GB OR Great Britain OR London OR England)) AND (UK OR GB OR Great Britain OR London OR England)

Table provides list of all studies included, providing information on location, study design, sample size, and participants. A summary of key risk factors identified are also shown. Further quantitative results can be found within the papers referenced

Table of SWiM checklist used as guidance to report methods of the narrative synthesis conducted. Includes where information can be found in manuscript by page number

SWiM covers reporting of the key features of synthesis including how studies are grouped, synthesis methods used, presentation of data and summary text, and limitations of the synthesis.

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Haylock, S., Boshari, T., Alexander, E.C. et al. Risk factors associated with knife-crime in United Kingdom among young people aged 10–24 years: a systematic review. BMC Public Health 20 , 1451 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09498-4

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Article Contents

Introduction, contextualizing knife crime prevention orders, the usual suspects, from the punishable subject to the regulatory subject, compliance and punishment, status criminalization as ‘othering’, hybrid proceduralism as a regulatory technique, acknowledgements.

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‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject

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Jennifer Hendry, ‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject, The British Journal of Criminology , Volume 62, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 378–395, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab063

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Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of procedural hybridization, and highlights the worrying manner in which such criminalization, underpinned by a preventive logic and facilitated by this hybrid procedure, enables new forms of ‘othering’. Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law.

‘Punish the children of the poor, and prevent the wrongdoer..’. Misquote of the inscription on the Old Bailey

The Knife Crime Prevention Order (KCPO) was introduced in January 2019, ostensibly in response to the high and rising 1 rates of knife crime in England and Wales. 2 Intended as an ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, KCPOs will — according to published Home Office guidance — ‘help to divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, away from being involved in knife crime’ ( Home Office 2019 ). Already being referred to as the ‘knife ASBO’, 3 the KCPO is the latest in an increasingly long line of hybridized civil/criminal procedures 4 aimed at preventing ‘deviant’ or undesirable activity in circumstances where existing criminal justice provisions are seen as insufficient to do so. It is — as this paper will argue — a paradigmatic case within the broader category of pre-emptive hybrid measures known as civil preventive orders (CPOs); paradigmatic in the sense that it is one of the latest in an iterative progression of this regulatory technique and the criminology of the self ( Garland 2001 ). The hybridity of such procedures lies in how, and despite their purportedly civil character, such orders carry criminal sanctions if violated. They proceed in stages: the court first identifies the objectionable behaviour, imposes restrictions aimed at its prevention and accompanies these with a warning of punishment in the event of a breach ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 175).

This article critically analyses the introduction of KCPOs in England and Wales, considering the motivations behind their 11th-hour addition to the Offensive Weapons Bill, and the goals underlying the use of this particular hybrid procedure. It highlights KCPOs as a classic iteration of civil/criminal hybrid procedures and presents the argument that KCPOs represent an ideologically driven policy ( Garland 2001 : 135) that is instrumentally and disproportionately employed to regulate the behaviour of ‘difficult’ populations — in this instance, predominantly Black children in urban environments who carry knives. The article further argues that KCPOs explicitly target these ‘usual suspect’ regulatory actors ( Lacey 2012 ), denying them the procedural protections of the criminal law with a view to controlling their behaviour and fast-tracking their criminalization. It concludes by placing KCPOs within the broader trend of Westminster governmental reliance on explicitly preventative procedurally hybrid forms, arguing that not only are they illiberal but also contrary to the rule of law.

This argument proceeds in four parts. The article will first contextualize KCPOs, charting the grounds for their development and introduction and outlining core criticisms from civil society actors. It will then situate KCPOs within criminal law’s preventive turn, connecting the use of such measures with the pre-emptive logic of security ( Cohen 2005 ) and the worrying legislative tendency to employ so-called regulatory offences ( Picinali 2016 ) to circumvent the procedural protections of the criminal law. 5 It will also draw attention to the manner in which KCPOs enable the anticipatory regulation of individuals whose wrongdoing is merely potential. Third, it will introduce, contra John Braithwaite’s archetypal ‘virtuous’ and ‘rational’ regulatory subjects ( 2002 ), the ‘difficult’ regulatory suspect that is both created and designated by offences like KCPOs. It will lead to the argument that KCPOs are a form of status criminalization that facilitates differential treatment of individuals under the law, contrary to the liberal tenets of classic criminal law, liberal criminology ( Loader 2007 ), and the egalitarian values of the rule of law. Finally, this article will argue that it is the very hybridity of KCPOs that facilitates the operation of these problematic features, which gives good reason to interrogate other instances of preventive civil/criminal procedural hybridity whenever they are introduced and implemented. In terms of the iterative progression of this regulatory technique, therefore, my focus on KCPOs presents them not as a novelty but rather an illustration of this approach’s recursiveness.

There is a serious knife crime problem in England and Wales; in 2019 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published the worst knife crime statistics in a decade ( ONS 2019 ). 6 Indeed, although this article criticizes the ‘sacrifice of values resulting from [the KCPO’s] particular legal form’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 299, in respect of the ASBO), it is still possible to concede that it has been devised to combat ‘a genuine and significant social problem’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 299). ONS figures for 2019 put the number of offences involving knives or sharp instruments recorded by police at 45,627, up 7% from the year before and 49% from 2011 when comparable records began. Even controlling for relative population density, the problem is most intense in cities, with London alone accounting for a third of recorded offences; this appears to be the justification for London’s selection as the location of the 14-month long KCPO pilot trial, initially scheduled to commence on 6 April 2020 but delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the Government, police, activists, charities and communities are united in recognizing the need to tackle these continual increases in knife crime, KCPOs are far from being a well-received measure. Indeed, civil society actors such as the Standing Committee for Youth Justice (SCYJ), although welcoming the Government’s commitment to tackling knife violence, have expressed disappointment that its response ‘falls short of constituting a public health approach’ ( SCYJ Submission to Consultation 2019 ); UK Parliamentary debates on the Offensive Weapons Bill had specifically acknowledged the importance of a holistic public health approach to knife crime ( Hansard 2018 , 2019 a , b ). 7

In spite of the opposition from activists and charities over both the form and approach of KCPOs to this problem of knife crime, their introduction has been generally welcomed by the police. The Head of Crime at the College of Policing, David Tucker, has remarked that the London pilot is ‘a positive step towards understanding how police can divert those who may be carrying knives, or who are at greatest risk of being drawn into serious violence, without having an adverse effect on their lives’ ( College of Policing 2020 ). The additional powers that KCPOs give to the police were, in fact, a core motivation for both their design and introduction. As the then-Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, Victoria Atkins MP, explained during the Parliamentary debate on the Bill that introduced these orders, the Government

wanted to give the police the power, through the Bill, to seek an order from the court, on a civil standard of proof, so that the state can wrap its arms around children if schools and local police officers think they are at risk of carrying knives frequently’ ( Hansard 2019 b : 5/29).

For anyone sceptical as to what such ‘arm-wrapping’ on the part of the state might involve, Atkins MP clarified that KCPOs mirror similar prevention orders already in existence, by ‘placing negative and positive requirements on children who do not necessarily have a criminal conviction’ ( Hansard 2019 b : 5/29).

Section 14 of Part 2 of the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 provides that courts can make such orders in respect of a person aged 12 or over without a conviction if that court is satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that this person has ‘had a bladed article with them without good reason or lawful authority’ in a public place, school, or college on at least two occasions within the preceding two years. 8 An additional condition is that the court thinks that such an order is necessary to protect the public, or specific members of the public, from the risk of harm involving a bladed article, or to prevent the defendant from committing a crime with a said bladed article. The positive and negative requirements to which Atkins MP refers are found in section 21 of the Act, and include geographical, associational and online restrictions, a curfew (the negative requirements), and attendance at educational courses and/or counselling (the positive requirements), for a time period ranging from 6 to 24 months. Punitive criminal sanctions, such as a custodial sentence of up to two years, a fine, or both, can be imposed on breach. 9

KCPOs are a clear point of continuity in an established policy trend of using preventive hybrid procedures to control undesirable potential behaviour — a policy trend, it should be emphasized, that has exhibited no sign of learning from past experience and has, instead, appeared to proceed counterfactually. While similar in form to other civil preventive orders (CPOs) (see, inter alia , Simester and von Hirsch 2006 ; Ashworth and Zedner 2010 ; Shute 2018 ), KCPOs are specifically concerning for several interconnected contextual, procedural and principled reasons. First, as the quote from Atkins MP highlights, these orders are largely intended to marshal the behaviour of children . Patrick Green, Chief Executive of knife crime prevention charity the Ben Kinsella Trust, has commented that, while his organization supports ‘all approaches that aim to lead to a reduction in knife crime … we are concerned that young people as young as 12 may well be criminalized for breaching these orders’. 10 Moreover, and although the stated aim of KCPOs is prevention, the likely age of individuals subject to them and the comparative ease of inadvertent breach can only contribute to the stealth criminalization of disadvantaged children.

A second issue with KCPOs is that the personalized positive and negative requirements they impose upon an individual combine to comprise severe and lengthy restrictions upon that individual’s movements and activity, both online and offline. These pre-conviction restrictions sit uncomfortably alongside the civil standard of proof being employed by the court, neatly severing the classic criminal law connection between criminal activity and responsibility, and undermining certain fundamental criminal law principles such as the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, with no specification in the legislation as to the evidence base required for the triggering offence, it is unclear, for example, the extent to which contextual considerations can be employed, or how some evidence could underpin a KCPO application while other evidence could constitute a criminal offence ( SCYJ 2019 : para 2.3).

Third, Atkins MP’s ‘arm-wrapping’ metaphor itself begs some additional attention. Coming as it does from a Government largely responsible for austerity measures and cuts that impact directly upon the very category of children and young people likely to be made subject to KCPOs, such an emphasis on ‘wraparound care’ 11 and services seems palpably insincere. Unease with this was voiced in the very same Commons debate, no less, with Louise Haigh MP (Labour) telling the House of her concern that, ‘in trying to establish so-called wraparound care for young people, these orders will inevitably end up focusing on the restrictive elements such as curfews, social media bans and prohibitions, rather than the potential for positive, rehabilitative action’ ( Hansard 2019 a : 239). What, then, are the reasons for this specific emphasis on care and services? It is submitted that there are two clear animating motivations: not only did it allow the Government to cleave to the ‘public health approach’ spin that accompanied the legislation, despite being barely evident within it, but it also provides an additional shield against those who would point out that there are already in existence criminal justice measures applicable to knife crime offences where there is reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, notably the conditional caution (importantly, available only to person ages 18 or over) 12 or the reintroduced youth caution (ages 10–17). 13

Finally, and as has been demonstrated by the controversy surrounding the Home Office’s 2019 chicken shop food box anti-knife campaign 14 — represented on social media by the hashtag #knifefree — there are significant issues of race introduced by KCPOs. Linda Logan, chair of the Magistrates Association’s Youth Court Committee, has voiced specific unease in this regard, noting that her organization is ‘particularly concerned that [the] use [of these orders] may worsen existing overrepresentation of black, Asian and minority ethnic young people in the justice system and [that] this issue must therefore be at the heart of the evaluation of the pilot’ ( Logan 2020 ). Not only are KCPOs likely to contribute further to the over-policing of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities through, for example, the use of alleged compliance-ensuring techniques such as surveillance and heightened stop and search, but such measures are also liable to result in more Black children subject to a KCPO being disproportionately found to be in breach. While the ill-judged #knifefree chicken shop box campaign was rightly met with outrage and opprobrium on social media and beyond, with many commentators expressing incredulity at what appeared to be blatant racial profiling, such allegedly precautionary behaviour on the part of law enforcement officials feeds into a public consciousness in which ‘non-white people are disproportionately engaged with and predisposed to criminality’ ( Gilroy 1982 ; Williams and Clarke 2018 : 235). As Alpa Parmar notes ( 2016 : 64), ‘there is now greater awareness that what we see in the court setting are the cumulative consequence of the intersection of various forms of disadvantage that disproportionately impact on black and minority ethnic groups’, and so considerations of intersectionality should also be borne in mind here (see also Crenshaw 1989 ): age, gender, class and poverty can all combine with race to create a clear picture of social disadvantage.

The specific issues with KCPOs outlined here — that they explicitly target children, unduly affect Black children, and are disproportionate, stigmatizing, and restrictive — can be situated more broadly within what has come to be known as criminal law’s ‘preventive turn’ ( Carvalho 2017 ). Two further critical points are worth noting in this regard. First, the preventive nature of KCPOs means they operate proactively, anticipatorily and in advance of activity or behaviour that would usually attract the label ‘criminal’. This pre-emptive logic of security ( Zedner 2009 : 73; also generally Ramsay 2012 ) is what paves the way for earlier and earlier intervention on the part of the state in the name of the greater good, insofar as that means for the benefit of the ‘virtuous’ majority. In their orientation towards first anticipating and then pre-emptively combatting risky behaviour, therefore, KCPOs — like ASBOs before them — can be said to represent a blatant form of criminalization, albeit ‘an ex ante criminal prohibition, not an ex post facto criminal verdict’ ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 178). The semantic mislabelling as a ‘civil process’ here should leave us in no doubt of the ultimate destination at the sharp end of this particular regulatory pyramid ( Ayers and Braithwaite 2002 ; Braithwaite 2002 ). 15

Continuing in the vein of security’s pre-emptive logic, the second point of note here is that the justification for the use of KCPOs comes in the form of normatively motivated political expediency, often in impatient or reflex response to ‘mass-mediated, emotionally charged and urgently pressed public concerns about crime and disorder’ ( Loader 2006 : 581). The difficulty with this, however, is that in real or perceived situations of crisis or uncertainty, the precautionary approach facilitated by the aforementioned impetus of prevention prompts ‘decision-makers…to err on the side of caution’ ( Crawford 2009 : 819), and caution invites prejudice: ‘any individual who is potentially dangerous has to be contained before s/he can put the community at risk’ ( Carvalho 2017 : 182). Accompanying this ‘reassurance rhetoric’ ( Erikson 2007 : 213) of ‘tough on crime’ and ‘restoring public confidence’, therefore, comes a counterfactual focus on an ‘archaic criminology of the criminal type, the alien other’ ( Garland 2001 : 135; Lacey 2011 ; Neocleous 2016 : 7), commonly for an overtly political end — as in this example, the preventive reduction of youth knife crime. But prejudice is even more insidious in this particular context as, layered upon this ‘criminology of the other’ ( Garland 1996 ), is the ‘myth of black criminality’ ( Gilroy 1982 ). Without needing to be told, without needing proof, the public already believes that in the context of knife crime the offenders are young Black men, benefit dependent, and involved in drugs, other anti-social behaviour, and low-level criminality ( Williams and Clarke 2018 ). So the refrain goes: these ‘deviants’ are found in that part of town, they dress in those clothes, they hang around in an intimidating manner… And well, if normal criminal justice processes are insufficient in tackling these issues, then more powers are simply necessary so that something can be done (about Them ).

While the reactionary aspects of this inherent procedural instrumentality are troubling in themselves, this is even more so in light of the fact that such expediency on questionable grounds of security is de facto privileged over considerations of human rights, civil liberties and due process ( Hendry and King 2017 : 733). The important pivot to note here is that KCPOs allow for the regulation, not just of undesirable behaviour, but of the (categories of) individuals suspected of such behaviour. The next section will explore this point in more depth.

It is generally accepted that reliance on both the language and techniques of regulation has underpinned an instrumentalized interventionism on the part of the state. Indeed, Adam Crawford (2009 : 811) has noted that ‘ideas of “better regulation” [have been] used to circumvent and undermine established criminal justice principles, notably those of due process, proportionality and special protections traditionally afforded to young people’. KCPOs certainly fit within this description, with the then-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Knife Crime and Violence Reduction, Sarah Jones MP, commenting on these very considerations: ‘imprisoning a young person — as young as 12 years old — for two years for breaching this order is completely disproportionate’ ( Grierson 2019 ). In effect, what are presented as regulatory offences are backed up by ‘real crime’ measures ( Lacey 2011 ; Norrie 2014 ) and justified by a preventive logic.

While KCPOs are a paradigmatic example in this regard, they are far from unique. In relation to the problem of rough sleeping, for example, Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs) 16 provide local councils with a purportedly civil law alternative to criminalization under the controversial Vagrancy Act 1824, but breach of such an order will result in a fine which, if left unpaid, can result in a summary conviction and a £1,000 penalty. Similarly, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 has just this April introduced the Domestic Abuse Protection Order (DAPO), which continues the trend away from victim-led civil measures addressing domestic abuse and towards more explicit civil/criminal hybridization. Similar in structure and operation to the prior Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) 17 — also a hybrid procedure — the DAPO is of broader application, more flexible duration, and includes alongside negative requirements positive requirements such as electronic monitoring. Similar in structure to the KCPOS, violation of DAPO requirements constitutes a breach, a criminal offence subject to a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. In terms of regulating undesirable behaviour, therefore, such hybrid procedures, namely civil orders with criminal consequences, appear — increasingly — to be the first port of call.

So far, this article has argued that KCPOs are not only targeted towards preventing particular anti-social or undesirable behaviours but also employed instrumentally to control ‘difficult’ regulatory subjects, that is to say, the dangerous other introduced by criminal law’s preventive turn. 18 This section will pursue this point further. It will argue that instead of being treated either as the responsible ‘punishable subject’ of classical criminal law ( Farmer 2016 : 188–92; Garland 2001 : 124–7) or either the ‘virtuous’ or ‘rational’ subjects of responsive regulation ( Braithwaite 2002 : 32, ch2 generally), individuals made subject to KCPOs are pre-emptively designated as deviant or difficult to control . It makes the case that this categorization as a ‘difficult’ regulatory subject is enabled by ‘status criminalization’ ( Lacey 2016 : 148–60), which is not premised upon actual behaviour — at the point a KCPO is issued, any wrongdoing remains merely potential— but rather ‘bad character’ ( Redmayne 2002 , 2015 ), itself underwritten by a combination of ‘populist punitivism’ ( Loader 2006 : 578–1) and racialized othering.

Criminal law gives ‘institutional form to…the underlying moral structure of responsibility practices’, which in turn provides the community with the means of responding to ‘properly recognized public wrongs’ ( Farmer 2016 : 188–92; Garland 2001 : 190). By holding an individual responsible for their actions, criminal law demonstrates an innate respect for that individual as a rational agent, that is, as a reasonable person. In this sense, the punishable individual is ‘both the source and the subject of the criminal law’ ( Farmer 2016 : 190) insofar as criminalization results from this congruence of wrongful behaviour and responsibility for that behaviour. Criminal law is an instrument used to govern subjects, and it does this by means of responsibilization .

The yoking of individual rationality to individual responsibility thus performs an important legitimizing function for the criminal law, which derives considerable authority from the premise that limitations have been adequately communicated by the state to its citizens, and that each recognizes the boundaries of reasonable behaviour ( Naffine 2009 : 71–2). In addition to a citizen knowing these parameters, however, they must possess the capacity to act in accordance with them: as Nicola Lacey notes, ‘a legitimate contemporary criminal justice system criminalises only when “an offender’s capacities of understanding and self-control were properly engaged at the time of the alleged offence’ ( 2010 : 117). This relationship is complicated, however, by its embeddedness within civil society: social life is managed, and civil order maintained, by not just the criminal law but also other forms of social control. Situated within social networks, therefore, the individual becomes subject to what Farmer calls a ‘systematization of responsibility’ — not only are they accountable for specific actions as the punishable subject, but they are also subject to control in the form of general societal expectations ( Farmer 2016 : 193–4). Responsibility, according to this understanding, is a mechanism of standard-setting for the purpose of maintaining social order ( Farmer 2016 50–2 and 193–4; Brown and Baker 2012 : 9–26).

Contemporary techniques of control draw on regulatory ideas as much as on classic criminal justice ones, particularly in terms of managing individual behaviour ( Crawford 2009 : 812). Indeed, in terms of controlling people’s behaviour, the developing regimes of regulation exist in parallel — sometimes connected, sometimes separate — with criminal justice. Whether criminal law and regulation are viewed as separate regimes or as points on a continuum of behavioural governance, individual responsibility plays a different role in each. Relevant here is the responsive regulation regime, which ‘responds’ to non-compliance with the established rule or standard with an escalation of sanctions. The (dis)incentive structure within the ‘dynamic model’ regulatory pyramid is intended to ‘solve the puzzle of when to punish and when to persuade’ ( Braithwaite 2002 : 30), with the idea being that, as progress is made up the pyramid, so the interventions increase in their punitiveness. The subject of responsive regulation is trifurcated correspondent to three different stages of responsive regulation: there is the virtuous actor — for whom techniques of restorative justice will be employed; there is the rational actor, whose behaviour will be met with techniques of deterrence; and there is the incompetent or irrational actor, for whom the remaining strategy is incapacitation or removal, (and who does not feature relative to criminal justice applications for similar capacity reasons as those discussed for the punishable subject of criminal justice) ( Braithwaite 2002 : 32).

In terms of controlling a subject’s behaviour, however, the respective regimes of criminal justice and responsive regulation operate according to fundamentally different values: ‘criminal justice is founded on principles of independence and impartiality, while regulation promotes pluralistic and flexible pragmatism’ ( Quirk et al. 2010 : 20). Prominent in terms of responsive regulation’s efficient and dynamic-model pragmatism, 19 therefore, is its ability to pivot from the maintenance of an established, publicly promulgated, general standard into differential — often individualized — treatment of a regulatory subject. As Crawford has observed with reference to anti-social behaviour provisions,

many (though not all) of the powers seek to individualize control by tailoring the response and regulatory regime … to the circumstances of those who are the subjects of regulation. […] They permit the micro-regulation of individual lifestyles, governing the intimacies of personal activities, dress and behaviour. These orders that do not ‘personalize control’ focus instead on regulating places… or premises ’ ( 2009 : 820, emphasis in original).

This personalized control option facilitates targeted interventions by the state into the life of the regulated subject, with their behaviour subject to bespoke restrictions. Indeed, the KCPO, with its individualized positive and negative requirements, is a paradigmatic example of this ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 181–2).

While the contrast here with the abstract, universal, moral, punishable subject of the criminal law could not be starker, that is not to say that this disjunction is necessarily problematic. Were the distinction between compliance and punitive approaches within crime control to be robustly maintained then there would arguably be no issue: ‘real crime’ would receive punishment, while those committing ‘victimless’ regulatory offences would be held to account through compliance mechanisms. The difficulty here is that the very dynamism of the regulatory pyramid precludes this separation, with each approach instead of being seen to comprise part of a crime control ‘toolkit’ ( Sanders 2010 : 57). Andrew Sanders has observed that this is integral to Braithwaite’s 2002 argument:

At a normative level … we should integrate compliance and punitive approaches in respect of all crime, both in our theoretical thinking and in policy-making. ‘Neither compliance nor punishment’ should, in themselves, be seen as goals of criminal justice; rather, they should both be seen as means of achieving broader crime control goals. Further, this thinking should be applied to all crimes, without an artificial separation of ‘normal’ from ‘regulatory’ crime’ ( Sanders 2010 : 57).

The next section will lead the argument that KCPOs — and other civil/criminal hybrid procedural forms requiring (two-step) escalation from compliance to sanction — similarly and deliberately short-circuit this distinction.

Unlike the punishable subject, as discussed, an individual targeted by or made subject to a KCPO is not afforded the respect of the criminal law in its recognition of their wrongdoing and rationality, and thus their responsibility; such recognition necessarily fails without (evidence of) wrongdoing. Similarly, as a regulatory subject, an individual exposed to ad hominem or differential treatment (without reason) under the law is not afforded the respect of equal consideration as a citizen. A core element of the rule of law is that it does not permit fundamental differentiations in status amongst members of the relevant polity. Indeed, the rule of law can be understood as ‘equality before the law’, in the sense that:

government must govern under a set of principles in principle applicable to all . Arbitrary coercion or punishment violates that crucial dimension of political equality, even if, from time to time, it does make government more efficient’ ( Dworkin 2004 : 29, my emphasis).

Society is not only reliant on citizens respecting the authority of the government to set the rules, as demonstrated by behaviour compliant with these rules; rather, this needs to be a relationship of reciprocal respect ( Finnis 2011 : 272–3, my emphasis). Governments are reciprocally required to respect their citizens as self-determining rational agents, capable of comprehending and conforming to rules. This right to respectful consideration is compromized in the event that the basic equal status of citizens is differentiated without sufficient and provable justification ( Green and Hendry 2019 : 275–6), whether that differentiation concerns either an individual or a (sub)group.

This section leads the argument that KCPOs, via the very form of the two-step civil/criminal hybrid procedure, violate this basic egalitarian precept by eliding the classic distinction between compliance and punishment. The problematic result of this elision is that the regulatory subject is here escalated into becoming the punishable subject without having committed a crime for which another citizen would be held similarly liable. Here the much-vaunted flexibility of responsive regulation becomes more of a concern than a boon, as the dynamic relationship between prevention and sanction, understood as existing within a toolkit of crime control measures, fast-tracks the ‘difficult’ regulatory subject into this self-fulfilling category.

At this juncture, there are no citable cases that can be drawn from the delayed April 2020 London pilot study, but a hypothetical instance of a KCPO is a useful illustration:

Damon’s Case: On two occasions within one academic year, Damon was suspected of having a knife on his person while at school, ‘without good reason or lawful authority’. In a Magistrates’ Youth Court, he is made subject to a KCPO under OWA 2019 s14, that is, without a conviction. A negative requirement of this order is to be at his place of residence between the hours of 8 pm and 8 am every night of the week (i.e. a curfew, under s21(2)(a)), while a positive requirement is to attend a counselling appointment once per week (under s21(2)(d)). The curfew and the counselling appointment thereby constitute two separate micro-regulations particular to Damon and his circumstances. Damon returns home one Friday evening at 9 pm, and is subsequently held to be in breach of the order. The excuse provided for this breach is deemed not to be a reasonable one, and so Damon is held summarily to be guilty of an offence under s29(1) and, under s29(2), is liable to imprisonment for six months. 20

Several issues are raised by Damon’s case, not least that of due process, whereby a child under the age of 18 is imprisoned on the strength of — to be clear — what could be police surmisal of routine knife possession, accepted by the Youth Court on the balance of probabilities; and proportionality, whereby Damon’s punishment — potentially in the form of a six-month custodial sentence — is out of kilter with the infraction of breaching the order. Importantly, here, the triggering event of the order’s breach is the curfew violation, itself an ex ante prohibition and an individualized behavioural control to which Damon and Damon alone is subject ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 178–80). This non-compliance with the order serves to propel Damon expeditiously and directly from suspected knife carrier and potential knife crime offender to ex post criminalization, where the triggering activity is not only itself legitimate but also very remote from the potential offence targeted by the order. It should also be noted here that, while the ‘Damon’s case’ hypothetical has concerned KCPOs, this argument is generally applicable to two-step prohibitions, notably CPOs (for example, Public Space Prevention Orders (PSPOs), Domestic Violence Protection Orders (DVPOs), and Super Football Banning Orders (SFBOs)).

So far, this section has raised three core points. To reiterate: first, KCPOs facilitate the pre-emptive regulation of the behaviour of individuals whose wrongdoing remains merely potential . Second, whilst prima facie geared towards the prevention of undesirable behaviour — that is, the carrying of a knife — KCPOs instrumentally and disproportionately target specific categories of individual, the ‘usual suspects’ of knife crime. Third, and whilst it is acknowledged that future governance requires the making of risk calculations, the problematic inclusion of subjective perceptions within such calculations ( Crawford 2009 : 819, in the context of anti-social behaviour measures) opens the door to othering within the holistic operation (within which is included the targeting, application, making, enforcing and prosecuting in the event of a breach) of KCPOs. The final part of this section will lead to two further connected points: this othering is both obscured and justified by means of reliance on, not actual individualized conduct but, rather, perceived and taxonomical ‘bad character’, 21 and that this reliance is, in itself, unjustifiable.

Nicola Lacey has argued that the contemporary criminal law in England and Wales has been moving steadily towards a renewed — or rather, a more overt — reliance on character -based attribution of criminal responsibility ( 2011 : 12–3; also Redmayne 2015 ; Lacey 2016 ). She observes that character-based principles are (re-)emerging in terms of both the substantive and the procedural law, and warns that ‘character-facilitated criminal responsibility-attribution’ is most likely to be employed against those members of society ‘who form easily identifiable objects of anger, fear or resentment’ — that is, where the usual suspects are today’s ‘ symbols of “otherness” relative to contemporary anxieties and technologies’ ( Lacey 2011 : 39). These usual suspects, these ‘new others’, include, according to Barbara Hudson, ‘[f]undamentalists, false asylum seekers, promiscuous women, indigenous persons with pre-modern lives, [and] migrants who do not subscribe to the values of the host country’ ( 2008 : 277).

Much like the reliance on the character, such criminalization of status is not a new legal development; at least, not in the sense that status offences targeted at dangerous categories — the vagrant, the prostitute, the inebriate — existed in the past ( Lacey 2016 : 157). Nevertheless, the recent reappearance of this type of assumed-criminality status criminalization is a real concern, not least because of the manner in which it is being operationalized via civil/criminal hybrid procedures, of which KCPOs are a paradigmatic example of a pathologizing mechanism. Lacey articulates these ‘doctrinally explicit character shortcuts to responsibility’ as emblematic of ‘enemy criminal law’, that is, ‘essentially a police power which treats its objects as dangers to be managed, as distinct from citizen criminal law, which responds to subjects invested with rights’ ( 2016 : 158).

These points are thrown into particularly sharp relief when the focus is shifted back to the concrete issue of KCPOs. Here the juxtaposition between the professed public health motivations and ‘wraparound care’ assurances, with the marginalizing and stigmatizing operation of a preventive measure so aggressive as to have picked up the moniker of enemy criminal law ( Ohan 2010 ), is a particularly stark one. To be clear on this point: in England and Wales in 2019, under a stated public health banner, under-scrutinized legislation was passed that not only perpetuated the problematic idea that either being a particular sort of person or having a particular status in itself can ground criminal responsibility, but which also targeted this instrumentally at the country’s disadvantaged children. This is made yet extra sinister when viewed through the prism of race: as Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke note, ‘there has long existed a “special” social category attributed to young black men, which serves to legitimize the development and application of increasingly complex and punishing penal apparatus’ ( 2018 : 235).

Status criminalization trades on abstractions and stereotypes, more ‘projected image than […] individuated person’ ( Garland 2001 : 179), and as such contributes to insidious generalizations concerning (sub)cultures — the injudicious #knifefree chicken shop box campaign mentioned earlier being a classic case in point ( Baker 2019 ). This vicious cycle is driven by the fiction of ‘official crime figures’ ( Parmar 2016 : 57; on the fiction of official statistics production processes, see Merry 2016 ), where processes of status criminalization combined with general community over-policing serve to perpetuate ‘folk devil’ type ideas of, for example, Black violence and criminality. Indeed, ‘the stereotyping of young black men as “dangerous, violent and volatile” is a longstanding trope that is ingrained in the minds of many in our society’ ( Williams and Clarke 2018 : 235).

While this broad-brush othering approach of status criminalization appears, on the face of it, to sit at odds with the heavily personalized ad hominem control experienced by an individual made subject to a KCPO, these can arguably be understood merely as escalating steps of the same preventive control mechanism. Risky or undesirable behaviour is presumed to be undertaken by risky or undesirable people, and so these difficult regulatory subjects — difficult because of their status as the potentially dangerous other— need to be controlled before they commit crime. 22 Indeed, the two-step progression of the KCPO is premised upon this presumed inevitability of criminal behaviour, which needs to be controlled pre-emptively by means of individualized restrictions and requirements. Moreover, while status criminalization involves the differential treatment of a group of citizens, and the requirements of a KCPO constitute the personalized micro-regulation of individual behaviour, both are — as argued above — evidently contrary to the egalitarian foundations of the rule of law by virtue of each comprising a fundamental differentiation in status amongst citizens. Ongoing intersectionality considerations, as mentioned above, should also be borne in mind here: while the race is disproportionately influential in designating the potentially dangerous other, other stigma-attracting factors such as disrupted education or truancy, unemployment, benefit dependency, and general poverty — themselves not race-neutral — all generate compounding effects.

By designating both individuals and whole groups of people as potentially deviant on grounds of risk mitigation and crime prevention they are reduced to being mere means to that securitized end ( Korsgard 1998 : xxi; Kant 1785). The wrongness of this move pertains on two counts. First, whereby the ends in question are improved public security and reduced crime rates, the regulatory differentiation on the basis of group membership serves to treat members of that group (or groups) as lesser in status qua citizen than members of the ‘virtuous’ or non-difficult majority. Second, and through these pre-emptive techniques of control, certain individuals and groups are deliberately exploited as means towards the stated ends of public security, with the result that these other rational beings are — both practically and symbolically — placed outwith. That is to say, outwith the (rest of) the society allegedly being protected by such securitized measures, and outwith the number of individuals aggregated to form ‘the public’, whose safety and ‘right to security’ are apparently paramount (see Ramsay 2012 ).

Our concern here should be in the deliberateness of this social division, and the manner in which the rights and procedural protections of one part of society are jettisoned to privilege the security of another. 23 Moreover, it should be a source of genuine worry in our society that the terminology of ‘enemy criminal law’ discussed earlier is more fitting than that of civil prevention. The next section will rely on the insights gleaned from the foregoing analysis of the paradigmatic case of KCPOs to argue that the politicized and instrumentalized use of civil/criminal procedural hybrids as a ‘pragmatic’ alternative to existing criminal law measures constitutes a problematic new regulatory technique used to control the behaviour of socially demonized ‘usual suspects’.

As Hendry and King have argued ( 2017 : 734), civil/criminal procedural hybrids are those ‘blended processes in either civil or criminal law that rely upon mechanisms normally associated with the other type, or those that omit procedural dimensions normally required by their own sort’. They blur the lines between the civil law and the criminal law, both in terms of their stated purposes — compensation or punishment — and the processes to be followed and standards to be met. Known alternatively as inter alia ‘middleground sanctions’ ( Mann 1992 ), ‘two-step prohibitions’ ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 ), ‘civil penalties’ ( White 2010 ), ‘quasi-criminal measures’ and ‘civil for criminal processes’ ( Young 2017 ), the use of hybrid procedures is driven by two recognized prosecutorial inconveniences with traditional criminal law. First, the procedural and evidential requirements of the criminal law are stricter than for civil processes, with certain procedural safeguards — such as the presumption of innocence, the burden of proof resting with the prosecution, and the heightened standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt ( Langbein 2003 ; Jackson and Summers 2012 ; Roberts and Hunter 2012 ) — in place for the specific protection of a suspect or an accused. These enhanced procedural safeguards operate against abuses of the power asymmetry inherent to the relationship between the individual and the state, not least the imbalance of their respective resources, and in acknowledgement of the potentially deleterious consequences of a guilty verdict ( Hendry and King 2015 ). Second, where the behaviour is merely undesirable but not criminal, the criminal law is inapplicable, even if such behaviour were to occur repeatedly or on an ongoing basis, such as, for example, recurring knife possession. Civil/criminal hybrid procedures thus provide means by which not only can elevated safeguards be circumvented, but undesirable conduct — whatever that may comprise — can be regulated. As Simester and Hirsch have noted in terms of what they call ‘two-step prohibitions’, procedural hybrids have been employed as a technique that effectively extends the criminal law to encompass behaviour that is minor wrongful activity, conduct adjacent to wrongful activity, or conduct sufficient to constitute wrongful activity only when done repeatedly ( Simester and Hirsch 2006 : 176–7).

This can clearly be seen in the types of activity regulated by such hybrid procedures: although this article has focused on the comparatively recent example of KCPOs, there was the first Football Banning Order back in 1987, 24 1998’s controversial and now-defunct ASBO, 25 Domestic Abuse Protection Order in 2021 26 and Public Space Protection Orders in 2014, 27 to mention but a few. Such measures are ostensibly intended to curtail or otherwise restrict behaviour deemed contrary to public safety and security ( Zedner 2009 ), but they do so by privileging ideologically driven expediency over considerations of due process ( Hendry and King 2017 ) and facilitating differential treatment that serves to escalate the individual from regulatory subject to punishable subject. While KCPOs are arguably an extreme iteration of this regulatory technique, they are neither the latest hybrid order nor do they show any sign of being among the last.

In these legislative moves towards the proactive forestalling of potential harms, the pre-emptive logic of security underpinning these orders is, once more, clearly evident. Also evident, as Ashworth and Zedner have noted, is ‘the fact is that the British Government [… has] seized on the civil preventive order as a model for increasing social control without the need to abide by the protections accorded to defendants in criminal cases’ ( Ashworth and Zedner 2011 : 302). To these observations can be added a third: under the guise of flexibility and pragmatism, the British Government relies on hybridized civil/criminal procedures to manage and control 28 undesirable populations, who are subjected to marginalization, stigmatization, denigration and experimentation. This article contends that this observable pattern introduces hybrid proceduralism as a distinct regulatory technique, one deployed disproportionately and speculatively against so-called ‘risk communities’ ( Rose 1996 : 331).

Thus far this article has led to the argument that the ‘usual suspects’ of knife crime, and those likely to be made subject to KCPOs, are children drawn disproportionately from minority ethnic groups. In terms of the procedurally hybrid preventive orders just mentioned, football hooligans ( James and Pearson 2018 : 44), domestic abusers, the homeless 29 and immigrants 30 can all be added to the list of undesirable or ‘deviant’ groups targeted. Just as with the foregoing example of suspected knife crime offenders, such ‘risk communities’ are pre-emptively identified as potentially deviant for the purpose of mitigating that risk to the rest of society. This is classic risk management: the potential danger is identified, and steps are taken to contain it before that risk either increases or manifests. What is noticeable here, however, is the slippage between risk assessment premised upon individual conduct and that premised upon a group or population membership. While the earlier discussion of status criminalization has already highlighted this catch-all form of othering, it is worth reiterating here that what this facilitates is the establishment of allegedly ‘dangerous’ subjectivity premised not upon individual agency but, rather, on association or categorization. In this regard, preventive strategies fail to uphold the premise that ‘assessments of risk [are] based on individual agency, and not on any political prejudice towards any specific population’ ( Carvalho 2017 : 183, my emphasis). Indeed, it is easy to doubt the plausibility of broad and general applicability when actual application is narrow and targeted, and correspond to the ease by which an individual can be categorized as belonging to one or more risk communities.

While this inherently discriminatory dimension of preventive measures is concerning in itself, it is in its combination with the procedurally hybrid form — which, to reiterate, specifically enables the evasion of criminal law’s fundamental protections — that it becomes troubling. For these are not measures that maintain the initial distinction between ‘real crime’ and ‘regulatory offences where the latter historically constitutes, as Alan Norrie has explained, a method of regulation free of moral implications ( Norrie 2014 , chapter 5 generally). On the contrary, and as has been argued throughout this article in terms of the paradigmatic case of KCPOs: civil/criminal procedural hybrids can be disproportionate, restrictive, stigmatizing and criminalizing ( Squires and Stephen 2005 : 525). The operative elision of civil and criminal procedure for the achievement of, if not explicitly criminal law objectives, then certainly security ones, is exposed here.

This is not merely ‘criminalization creep’, however, although the fact that hybridized procedures regulate some of the most commonplace interactions between the legal system and the public makes these deserving of greater scrutiny, notably where the interface between allegedly pragmatic risk management and increased local discretion ( Simester and von Hirsch 2006 : 180) on the part of, for example, magistrates, is liable to be problematic. More than mere creeping criminalization, hybrid proceduralism can be identified by, among other things: its experimental quality, its imaginative use of the different levers of control and compliance, the manner in which it fast-tracks criminality via an escalatory process, the insidious way it targets populations perceived as ‘other’ or in some other way undeserving of the protections of the rule of law, and its reliance on the mechanics of responsive regulation, namely efficiency, flexibility and pragmatism.

Having already argued that both ad hominem regulation and status criminalization are contrary to the egalitarian foundations of the rule of law, this article will conclude by similarly rejecting commonly vaunted appeals to pragmatism — often presented alongside flexibility as an advantage of responsive regulation — as insufficient to justify hybrid procedures in this respect. As discussed in relation to KCPOs, while such preventive hybrids may prima facie appear advantageous, they have been deliberately designed to ‘dodge’ both evidentiary and procedural requirements and, as such, to privilege ideologically-motivated political expediency over procedural legitimacy ( Hendry and King 2017 ). This instrumentalized use of the regulatory technique of hybrid proceduralism is underpinned by a fundamentally pragmatic understanding of the law, which can be broadly understood as one where decisions are taken with a view towards best serving the community’s future. In elevating the interests of the community or collective over the rights of the individual, however, a pragmatist will find ‘the necessary justification for coercion in the justice or efficiency or some other contemporary virtue of the coercive decision itself’ ( Dworkin 1986 :151). In the context of preventive hybrid orders, the obvious justification would be security , a logic that inevitably results in the protection of the ‘virtuous’ majority coming at the expense of the allegedly dangerous other. On this reasoning, pragmatism, as grounds for any diminution of due process protections, should be viewed with disquiet.

It is with this sense of disquiet over the preventive hybrid form that this critique will conclude. This article has undertaken an in-depth analysis of the civil/criminal procedural hybrid KCPO, with a view to providing the first comprehensive theoretical engagement with this particular preventive hybrid, as well as situating it within both the broader context of criminal law’s preventive turn and the debate on procedurally hybrid forms. KCPOs have been presented as one of the latest such hybrids, and the latest in an iterative progression of this regulatory technique, one that can be characterized by its recursiveness. Having drawn a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject — the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other — this article has made the case that preventive hybrids not only generate a category of ‘difficult’ subjects but also operate instrumentally to bypass the elevated procedural safeguards usually afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law. Importantly, this is the outcome even when, within the framework of a responsive regulatory cycle, KCPOs and other preventive hybrids purport to treat individuals subject to them as rational or virtuous. Such is the dynamic relationship between prevention and sanction — between compliance and punishment — that the preventive hybrid form facilitates slippage between difficult and thus potentially dangerous, and criminal. As this article has argued, in their combination of ad hominem regulation with the operative elision of the civil/criminal distinction aimed specifically at circumventing the elevated procedural protections of the criminal law, KCPOs have the potential for devastating effects upon disadvantaged children and young people, and for these effects to be borne disproportionately by minority ethnic children.

By presenting KCPOs as a paradigmatic example of civil/criminal procedural hybridity, and the latest in a continuous and problematic policy trend, this article has furthermore argued that it is this very hybridity that lies at the heart of its most problematic features. It has made the case that these insights provide the grounds for a fuller, broader interrogation of other instances of procedural hybridity, and the regulatory approach of hybrid proceduralism, and argued that such an interrogation is both timely and important in light of the manner in which such procedures are employed to target populations who are already othered within society more broadly. For the reasons already outlined, there is good cause to be wary of such developments. As a regulatory technique hybrid proceduralism arguably moves beyond mere criminalization creep by virtue of encompassing both the status of the individual and the potential behaviour in a quite deliberate manner. This is perhaps best illustrated by the proposed Serious Violence Reduction Order (SVRO) in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 currently being debated in Parliament. Already controversial for its proposed restrictions on protest rights, this Bill contains a less well-publicized but no less worrying SVRO, a civil order that purports to extend ‘stop and search’ police powers to allow their exercise without reasonable suspicion against offenders previously convicted of carrying a knife. Public consultation on this Bill has brought condemnation from civil society actors, on the grounds that SVROs allow police arbitrarily to detain and to search individuals, are likely to be used disproportionately against members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, and create conditions where individuals subject to them could be treated as perpetual criminals. In spite of these problems, the use of such hybrid orders appears, quite evidently, to be on the rise.

This legislative intentionality begs attention: within a responsive regulatory cycle, such procedurally hybrid forms in effect both create the difficult regulatory subject and reduce their procedural safeguards. An optimistic reading of this situation — where the allegedly ‘softer’ regulatory regime has ended up being harsher for certain differentiated populations than the existing criminal law alternatives — could be that the balance between securitization and due process has been inadvertently disturbed by a well-intentioned yet overblown interventionalism. A more sceptical reading, however, would point to regular and repeated use of this regulatory technique as clear evidence of a continuous and dysfunctional pattern. In this regard, those practices of othering, which this article has argued are inherent to such preventive hybrids, are exposed less as unanticipated and unintentional consequences of hybrid proceduralism and more as its ideological goals.

The Office for National Statistics has published the following rates of recorded knife crime offences for the past two years: 2019 — 45,627 (not including Greater Manchester); 2018 — 44,443.

Offensive Weapons Act 2019, chapter 7 part 2.

The Guardian 2019 (February 1). The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was available between 1998–2014 in England and Wales to anyone aged 10 or over; they were imposed by courts who deemed them necessary to achieve the stated goal of protecting the public from conduct ‘which caused or was likely to cause further harm, harassment, alarm, or distress’, employing the criminal standard of proof, and stipulating negative prohibitions only. As will become apparent, KCPOs differ, notably in their use of the civil standard and in their capacity to impose positive as well as negative requirements, although they are also applicable to children (in the case of KCPOs, individuals aged 12 and over).

Examples of preventive hybrids include inter alia the aforementioned ASBO, Football Banning Orders, Domestic Violence Protection Orders and Public Space Protection Orders.

Regulatory offences can be understood as a quasi-criminal offence employed to deter actors from dangerous or undesirable behaviour, and where no fault ( mens rea ) element is required.

BBC website 2020 (23 April).

In line with the World Health Organization position that ‘violence acts and spreads like a disease’, ( WHO 1996 : 24), a public health approach employs multisectoral cooperation to address the social, structural and environmental causes of violence with a view to breaking the cycle and thus improving both health and safety.

A KCPO can be made on conviction under section 19 OWA 2019 where the prosecution applies for one in addition to either the sentence imposed in respect of the offence (7a) or a conditional discharge order (7b). This is barely less problematic, however, as under sub-section 9 there is no admissibility requirement for the relevant evidence; according to the published Home Office Guidance on Knife Crime Prevention Orders, ‘That evidence does not need to be provided according to the strict rules of criminal evidence and the application may rely on the facts of the case for which the defendant has been convicted’ (2019: 6).

S29(2) OWA 2019.

BBC website (2020) .

Atkins MP: ‘We do not pretend that [KCPOs] will solve all knife crime, but they are about preventing young people from getting ensnared in criminal gangs or getting into a situation where they think that carrying a knife will protect them. This is about trying to wrap services around those children before they become criminalized ’ ( Hansard 2019 a : 231, emphasis added).

Criminal Justice Act 2003 s22–27.

Crime and Disorder Act 1998 s66A, as inserted by Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

BBC website (2019 , Baker).

Adam Crawford has observed that ‘Government interpretation of the “regulatory pyramid” [… is] an incremental tiered approach [that] conforms more closely to a ladder (or escalator!), where each subsequent intervention is more serious than the first’ ( 2009 : 825).

Antisocial Behaviour Act 2014, s59–75.

Crime and Security Act 2010 s24–33.

This article employs Michal Krumer-Nevo and Mirit Sidi’s sociological definition of othering, which indicates ‘the process of attaching moral codes of inferiority to difference’ ( 2012 : 300).

See the final section of this paper for a rejection of a pragmatism-based justification of preventive hybrids.

According to Home Office Guidance on KCPOs (2019: 18), the alternative options to a custodial sentence for those convicted of a breach include: unpaid work (community payback), rehabilitation activity requirements, undertaking particular programme/s geared towards behavioural changes, mental health treatment (with the defendant’s consent), drug rehabilitation and/or a drug testing order (with consent), drug and/or alcohol treatment (with consent) and alcohol abstinence and monitoring (again, with consent).

‘“His guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the same”, said Elizabeth angrily’ ( Austen 1813 : 66).

Garland’s (2001 : 185) discussion of the overlap between the two new criminologies — of, respectively, ‘everyday life’ and ‘the other’ — notes this as being ‘a shared focus on control [and] an acknowledgement that crime has become a normal social fact ’.

The connected issues of privilege and complicity lies outwith the scope of this article, but preventive orders are certainly reliant upon this social division. As Daniel Ohan notes, ‘the preventive order acts to bolster the trust of the public in the power of the criminal law to command authority by manifesting distrust in members of the polity whose conduct is suggestive of a deficient capacity and commitment to conform to its norms’ ( 2010 : 723).

Public Order Act 1986 s30, in force 1 April 1987.

Crime and Disorder Act 1998 s1.

Domestic Abuse Act 2021 ss27-49.

Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014 ss59-61.

For more on the distinctions between the inclination to manage, the urge to punish and further fundamental ambiguities around control, see D. Garland, The Culture of Control (OUP 2001 ).

Although PSPOs have a disproportionate effect upon homeless people, it should be noted that, unlike other individualized CPOs, these orders are spatial in nature.

As Ana Aliverti notes, ‘The “foreign criminal” has come to embody the nation’s most derided individual who combines racialized fears about the stranger and the criminal, and is the precursor of the recent foreign national agenda in criminal justice’ ( Aliverti 2020 : 12).

This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Leadership Fellowship award (Early Career) 2019–21 (grant number AH/S006680/1).

I would like to thank Alexander Maltsev for his assistance with the initial research for this article. Thanks are also due to Tahir Abass, Adam Crawford, Lindsay Farmer, Alex Green, Colin King, Sam Lewis, Jess Mant, Mitchell Travis, Elies van Sliedregt and Neil Walker for their considered comments on earlier drafts. The usual disclaimer applies.

Aliverti , A . ( 2020 ), ‘Patrolling the “Thin Blue Line” in a World in Motion: An Exploration of the Crime-Migration Nexus in UK Policing’ , Theoretical Criminology , 24 : 8 – 27 .

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Knife crime: causes and solutions – editors’ guide to what our academic experts say

Editor for Cities and Young People, UK edition

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There has been a torrent of media coverage about violent crime among children and young people in the UK. But it seems to offer little consensus on what’s causing this crisis, what the impact of measures taken by government and police are and what should be done to curb the violence.

In a debate often dominated by politicians, celebrities and media commentators, the voices of academics who have spent years researching this issue have not been heard enough.

That’s why we’re bringing you a round up of evidence-based views on the knife crime epidemic – including what action is really needed to prevent more young lives being lost.

Many of the academics featured have worked directly with young people and communities affected by knife crime, or with authorities and organisations working to manage it.

The epidemic in numbers

How many? 285 knife-related homicides recorded in the year ending March 2018 – the highest number since the Home Office Homicide Index began more than 70 years ago.

Who is affected? Young men aged 18 to 24 are the most affected. But there’s also been a 77% increase in homicides committed with knives by under-18s (2016 to 2018). And a 93% increase in the number of under-16s admitted to hospital due to knife attacks (since 2012).

The rate at which men are currently being killed by violence is over double that for women. And while statistics don’t detail the social backgrounds of victims and perpetrators, research indicates there’s a greater chance of being killed by violence the poorer you are.

Read more: Homicide rates are up in young men – austerity and inequality may be to blame

Why is knife crime increasing?

Discussions of violent crime among young people often start and finish with policing. But for academics, investigations begin with the experiences of young people themselves, as they seek to discover the underlying causes of knife crime.

1. Toxic environments for children, created by austerity

Knife crime is a symptom of the toxic environments that adults create around children, who then become both perpetrators and victims. It is created by politicians and by the politics of austerity. Stephen Case, professor of criminology, Loughborough University, and Kevin Haines, professor, University of Trinidad and Tobago

Homes, schools, neighbourhoods or recreational activities can become toxic environments for children, when their relationships and experiences fail to nurture them, protect them and help them to achieve their potential.

These toxic environments can leave children disaffected, fearful and vengeful. They are scared and provoked into carrying knives, joining gangs and committing violent acts.

It is no coincidence that the vast majority of knife crime takes place in neighbourhoods suffering from huge social disadvantage and disinvestment.

Impact of austerity in numbers

£422.3m : reduction in spending on services for young people in last six years

3,500: number of youth service jobs lost (since 2010)

600: number of youth centres closed (since 2010)

130,000: number of places in youth centres eliminated (since 2010)

Read more: Youth services try to mould young people – how about they help young people mould society instead?

2. Children and young people are afraid of becoming victims

Carrying a knife often started as a way to avoid becoming a victim … Most of the people I spoke to who had carried a knife had been threatened, some on multiple occasions. Some had been attacked and a few had been severely injured. Peter Traynor, senior research assistant, Manchester Metropolitan University .

Traynor’s research documented how some young people started carrying knives to avoid being victimised. He also points out that some had gone to the authorities for help, but had largely been ignored.

The one time I went to the police … when I was stabbed … they walked into the house and said how many people done it? I said so and so many people done it from that gang … and they all kind of looked at each other – as if it’s gang affiliated or whatever isn’t it? So they didn’t really care. But if it was just a normal person … they’d have taken it a lot more serious – 17-year-old boy from London.

3. Children and young people don’t trust the authorities to protect them

The link between carrying a weapon and distrusting the police is an important new finding … It’s possible that young people who live in high-crime neighbourhoods or who are already involved in crime may not see the police as being able or willing to protect them from harm. In those situations, it is unsurprising that a young person would see carrying a weapon as justified or necessary. Iain Brennan, research psychologist, University of Hull . If people feel society is unfair, they are less inclined to play by the rules and more likely to lash out violently. James Densley, associate professor, University of Oxford, and Michelle Lyttle Storrod, PhD researcher, Rutgers University.

Many neighbourhoods with high crime are already inclined to distrust police, owing to their experiences of abuse and institutional racism.

As violence has risen, the proportion of offences for which police have identified the culprit has fallen, and this further erodes civilians’ trust in authority.

When police fail to solve or deter crime, people will bypass law enforcement and use violence to resolve disputes or protect themselves from danger.

Growing tensions between police and communities can lead to further criminality, because successful police work depends heavily on cooperation with the public.

Shortage of police investigators has been described as a “national crisis” – even London’s Metropolitan Police Service is short some 700 detectives.

According to Becky Clarke, a criminal justice researcher, and colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University, reintroducing ineffective and discriminatory policing can lead to greater distrust and even cause more young people to carry weapons. Not only are the policing strategies being proposed right now likely to be ineffective, they say, but the strategies will certainly increase the criminalisation of young people and potentially increase weapon carrying.

Read more: Repeating flawed policies to tackle knife crime could put young people in more danger

Gangs, drill music, social media – overstated impact?

Gangs and youth violence are regularly conflated in mainstream media reports and government policy. Yet data from the Metropolitan Police in London has shown that a gang element was identified in only “a relatively small amount of serious youth violence” – under 5% of cases (2011 to 2016)

Drill music has come in for heavy criticism by Metropolitan Police Chief Cressida Dick, who in 2018 called on platforms such as YouTube to remove content which “glamourises” violent crime. It’s only the latest in a long series of panic about music videos. Fifteen years ago, for instance, ministers were concerned about “rap lyrics”. The panic about drill music “is leading to the criminalisation of everyday pursuits”, says academic Joy White, University of Roehampton . She warns that young people from poor backgrounds are now becoming categorised as troublemakers through the mere act of making a music video.

Social media may play some role in normalising the carrying of weapons, as documented by research carried out by James Treadwell, professor in criminology at Staffordshire University . But academics stress that the role of social media has been overstated, or at very least oversimplified by the media and policy makers.

How can the problem be solved?

Just giving police more power is not the solution – academic consensus

So far, government plans to tackle the issue have focused on granting police greater powers to surveil, stop and search, and punish “suspicious” young people. 

As part of the UK government’s decision to enhance police powers, Sajid Javid, the home secretary, will seek to introduce Knife Crime Prevention Orders which:

Can apply to any person aged 12 or over who carries a knife, has been convicted of a knife-related offence, or is suspected by police of carrying one.

Can impose curfews, geographical boundaries or social media restrictions.

Can result in conviction and a prison sentence of up to two years if the order is breached.

Javid’s proposals are flawed, because they are based on the fundamental misunderstanding that you can prevent violence by identifying and punishing those identified as ‘at risk’ of offending. But stigmatising young people as ‘risky’ draws them into conflict with the authorities, as young people become over-policed and over-surveilled. Jo Deakin, criminologist, and Laura Bui, criminologist, both at University of Manchester .

London’s gang matrix

London’s Metropolitan Police has a database that lists individuals as “gang nominals” with each given an automated violence ranking of green, amber or red.

It came under scrutiny by human rights group Amnesty International last year. According to Amnesty’s report, it could affect the lives of 3,806 people, 80% of whom are between 12 and 24 years old.

The gang matrix appears to discriminate against ethnic minorities: 78% of the people listed on the the matrix are black, despite the fact that black people only make up 27% of those people known by police to be responsible for serious youth violence – and only 13% of London’s population is black.

Read more: Police are using big data to profile young people, putting them at risk of discrimination

Solutions need to put children and young people first

Academics consistently advocate solutions that put children and young people first.

Here are some solutions for the UK government that academics have proposed :

Stop stigmatising young people – listen to them instead

Divert children and young people away from toxic environments and into positive, nurturing ones that meet their basic needs

Invest in youth services, social care and extracurricular activities

Provide educational support to reduce school exclusions and improve outcomes

Work with families and communities to support, educate and rehabilitate young people

Invest in community-based policing to restore trusting relations

Create opportunities for training and employment to improve young people’s chances finding work and building professional relationships

More relevant articles written by academics

Knife crime is a health risk for young people – it can’t be solved by policing alone

How former offenders can make great mentors for at-risk teens

An expert (and father) comments

Thanks to James Treadwell, Anthony Ellis, Stephen Case, Kevin Haines, Laura Kelly, Ellie Munro, Becky Clarke, Patrick Williams, James Densley, Michelle Lyttle Storrod, Robert Ralphs, Iain Brennan, Joy White, Jo Deakin, Laura Bui, Daragh Murray, Pete Fussey and other academics who have written for The Conversation.

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• Sajid Javid
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• Youth violence
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Policing the Crisis in the 21 st Century; the making of “knife crime youths” in Britain

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The terms ‘knife crime’ and ‘knife culture’ were first established in British crime discourse at the turn of 21 st century and represent a particular re-making of youth in post-industrial Britain. The generational impacts of advanced neoliberalism have intensified conflict between marginalised young people in the UK as they compete for success in high-risk informal economies and navigate the normalised brutalities of everyday violence. However, the impact of extreme inequality and structural violence on children has not been central in the response to youth-on-youth knife homicides in the 2000s and 2010s. Instead, these decades have been characterised by punitiveness and surveillance, increasing discriminatory stop and search practices and extending powers that target and control young people. Through conjunctural analysis of the making of ‘knife crime youths’ in the UK, this paper considers how shifting forms of cultural racism have been able to rearticulate child violence as cultural deficit, using race once again to work through the contradictions of late capitalism. Applying a radical criminological understanding of deviance labelling as a specific response to crime, this paper asks: To what extent is the construction of ‘knife crime’ a continuation of Policing the Crisis in the 21st century? And why has this process been relatively uncritiqued by practitioners and academics that contribute to ‘knife crime’ discourse? Using document, archive and discourse analysis this paper presents a social history of ‘knife crime youths’, depicting the formative interactions that have so far been obscured by the matter-of-fact dominance of the label and its practices.

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Introduction; rethinking ‘knife crime youths’

The term ‘knife crime’ is selectively used in British media to refer to a particular type of criminality. When used by the press, politicians, police and other authorised spokespeople, the label infers a particular context and demographic that has now become common knowledge in public discourse. As such, when ‘knife crime’ is mentioned in Britain, it will likely be assumed that we are talking about a type of crime that is distinctly youthful, that this is a problem located in the inner-city (particularly London), and that this crime type is characterised by youth culture disproportionately represented by Black or Asian young people. This article will retrace the interactions and communications that gradually assigned these associated meanings through the 2000s, arguing that the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ has performed a crucial hegemonic function by both facilitating cohesive social outrage and justifying the extension of police powers in post-industrial Britain.

The utility of ‘youth crime’ in political and social management has previously been detailed by sociologists and criminologists, recognising the cross-party commitment to ‘law and order’ political strategies from the 1970s onwards (Cohen, 1972 ; Gilroy, 1987 ; Hall et al., 1978 ; Muncie, 2009 ; Pitts, 2001 ). The discourse of ‘youth crime’ has been described as ‘electoral glue’ (Pitts, 2001 , p. 2) due to its capacity to construct consensus through fear, binding together the priority interests of different social classes, as well as presenting party unity through a clear common cause (ibid.). Existing research demonstrates how this cohesive collective anxiety requires routine renewal, through the emergence of novel moral panics (Cohen, 1972 ; Hall et al., 1978 ). Some of the most effective and enduring of these, are those that concern the eroding morality of today’s youth.

The concept of ‘youth’ is itself a social construct. Its meaning has evolved and adapted over time, reflecting the cultural, political and social context of its use (Jones, 2009 ). Anthropological studies of ‘youth’ have found it to be a shifting cultural category depending on socio-political circumstances, often telling us more about the society in question than about the youths themselves (Bucholtz, 2002 ). Whilst the term usually denotes a period of development that is between childhood and adulthood, there is no universal definition or age parameter for this distinction. Unlike ‘child’ and ‘adult’ the terms ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ tend to carry negative connotations; ‘‘Youth' and ‘adolescence’ usually conjure up a number of emotive and troubling images… notions of uncontrolled freedom, violence, irresponsibility, vulgarity, rebellion and dangerousness to those of deficiency, vulnerability, neglect, deprivation or immaturity' (Muncie, 2009 , p. 4).

There is certainly no legal definition of ‘youth’; in England and Wales a child legally becomes an adult when they turn 18 years old (Family Law Reform Act, 1969 ) with no intermediary terminology. In statutory youth services however, a ‘young person’ is defined as between the ages of 11 and 25 (Goddard, 2021 ). Whilst in healthcare, the label is used to imply knowledge and decision-making capacity, with practitioners advised by the General Medical Council that for those aged under 18, ‘ use the term ‘young people’ to refer to older or more experienced children who are more likely to be able to make these decisions for themselves ’ (GMC, 2013 , Appendix 2). Somewhat ironically, the ‘Youth Justice Board’ of England and Wales, has distanced itself from the language of ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ in recent years, advocating a ‘child first’ approach that reinforces the legal ‘child’ status through language, and highlights the reduced risk assessment skills of those aged under 18 (Goddard, 2021 ). Reflecting this same imperative of recognising developmental and social vulnerabilities, this article uses the term ‘young people’ to denote a broad category of individuals aged between 11 and 25, and ‘child’ or ‘children’ is used when referring specifically to those aged under 18.

For a category of criminality so closely attached to ‘youth’, available data on ‘knife crime’ offences differentiated by age is surprisingly limited (Williams & Squires, 2021 , p. 6). If we were to use a legal definition of adulthood beginning at age 18, statistics would suggest sharp instrument assault is predominantly an adult problem. Available recorded crime rates show that 10–17 year olds represent around one in five of knife crime perpetrators (Allen & Audickas, 2018 ) with the majority of knife possession offences recorded and those admitted to hospital for assault by sharp instrument being over the age of 18; 82% and 83% respectively (Allen & Harding, 2021 ). If we apply a broader definition of ‘youth’ to include those aged between 10 and 24 Footnote 1 we find that young people admitted to hospital with sharp instrument assault injury in 2020/21 make up 41% of all admissions (NHS Digital, 2021 ). This figure is not significantly different to the 38% of admissions for the comparable age range of 25 to 39 (ibid.), suggesting that sharp instrument injuries are by no means limited to ‘youth’.

Meanwhile, the highest rates of offences involving a sharp instrument in 2020/2021 were in the West Midlands, not London, with the highest proportional increase in Surrey (Allen & Harding, 2021 ). In the UK, Black and Asian families are twice as likely to live in disadvantaged areas than their white counterparts (Gov.uk, 2018 ) and are therefore disproportionately exposed to violence and crime in impoverished environments (Eades et al., 2007 ). However, once economic factors are accounted for, there is no correlation between ethnicity and knife offending (Eades et al., 2007 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ; Smith,  2005 ; Haylock et al., 2020 ).

It is true however, that a minority of young people carry and use knives in conflict and the death of young people and children through interpersonal violence is a devastating reality in contemporary Britain. Each young life cut short is a tragedy that sends shockwaves of trauma and harm through families and communities that are impacted. To be clear, it is not the intention of this paper to deny this reality, but rather to acknowledge that the framing of this violence through a constructed idea of ‘knife crime youths’ has had deliberate and harmful consequences. For all the talk of ‘tackling knife crime’ we’ve seen very little change in rates of violence and homicide amongst young people. Recorded knife offences were reported as reaching a record high in 2019 with the Office of National Statistics recording 45,627 offences, an increase of 7% from the year before and a 49% increase from 2011 (ONS, 2019 ). In 2021, London recorded its highest ever level of ‘teenage homicides’ in a single year (Slawson, 2021 ).

Over a decade ago, in 2008, the Met police declared ‘war on knife crime’ (Edwards et al., 2008 ), forming a specialist taskforce of one hundred and fifty uniformed officers targeting ten boroughs to conduct unlimited stop and search operations. Within a year, the use of controversial ‘Sect. 60’ searches, that do not require police to have ‘reasonable grounds’ for suspicion, underwent a six-fold increase to over 121,000 searches, whilst Sect. 1 searches (in which officers must have reasonable grounds for the search) doubled (Williams & Squires, 2021 , pp. 207, 208). The total number of searches in London increased by 292% in 2008 with the proportion of Sect. 60 searches increasing from 26 to 59% of weapon related searches (Williams & Squires, 2021 , p. 208). Racial disproportionality in stop and search more than doubled during this period. In 2007 Black people were 4.1 times more likely to be searched in London than white people, by 2008 they were 9.7 times more likely to be stopped (EHRC, 2012 , pp. 24, 25). Whilst arrest rates, that are often seen as a measure of stop and search success, halved from 4 to 2% throughout this period (McCandless et al., 2016 ).

The strategy of extending police powers and targeting young Black people has been operational since 2008, and yet the recent figures of knife offences suggest this previous approach has been ineffective. Nevertheless, during the 2019 general election campaign Boris Johnson reiterates the same law and order response as 2008, promising a ‘ majority Conservative government would come down hard on the scourge of knife crime ’(‘Boris Johnson: We will…’,  2019 ), through more stop and search powers, faster processing through the courts and harsher sentencing (ibid.). After success at the polls, the subsequent Conservative government introduced Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPO) as part of The Offence Weapons Act 2019. Described as providing an ‘additional preventive tool’ for use by police, critics have argued that KCPOs ‘ explicitly target children, unduly affect Black children, and are disproportionate, stigmatizing, and restrictive ’ (Hendry, 2022 , p. 382). In 2022 there was a recommitment to Sect. 60 searches, despite their impact on disproportionality and community relations, with the Home Office extending the powers to search without the need for grounds to a greater number of officers for longer periods of time (Home Office, 2022 ). With no evidence of its effectiveness (McCandless et al., 2016 ; Tiratelli et al., 2018 ) this persistent commitment to a policing solution and the cyclical extension and retreat of policing powers in response to ‘knife crime youths’ requires further interrogation.

In summary, there is no statistical justification for the framing of ‘knife crime’ as a youth phenomenon and yet the construction of knife crime youths has been largely unchallenged and increasingly racialised in public discourse. This paper will consider significant events in the making of ‘knife crime youths’, first retracing the events that defined knife crime through age, and secondly through race. Applying a radical criminological understanding of deviance labelling as a specific response to crime (Becker, 1963 ; Hall et al., 1978 ; Cohen, 1972 ) this paper asks: To what extent is the construction of ‘knife crime’ a continuation of Policing the Crisis in the 21st century? And why has this process been relatively uncritiqued by practitioners and academics that contribute to ‘knife crime’ discourse?

Research methods

This paper presents the results of document and archive, case studies and content analysis, depicting key moments in the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ in Britain. Secondary documents of news articles were identified for content analysis using the online database ProQuest, with the initial search criteria of news containing the exact phrase ‘knife crime’. Significant events in the construction of knife crime identified through content analysis were then more closely analysed as case studies, searching for all related reports. The specific cases that will be considered in depth in this paper are the death of Luke Walmsley in 2003, a 14 year old boy stabbed while at school in Lincolnshire, and the murder of Tom Rhys Pryce, a 31 year old lawyer killed in North London during a robbery. The analysis uses methods of discourse analysis (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002 ) to look closely at how meaning is constructed through language during these key moments in the history of knife crime. Using a framework of conjunctural analysis, as set out by Hall et al. ( 1978 ) these events are then contextualised in their political moment. Applying an interactionist approach (Becker, 1963 ) that sees all parties fit for investigation, this paper considers the actions and interests of the state, police and the media in the making of knife crime youths. Aspects of the analysis presented here formed part of the author’s PhD research and is expanded on in the author’s contribution to  ‘Rethinking Knife Crime; policing, violence and moral panic?’ (Williams & Squires, 2021 ).

A brief history of knife crime in the UK

Although rarely acknowledged within its discourse, the label ‘knife crime’ as a crime category in England and Wales has a relatively recent history. Originally a descriptor of particular forms of violence in Scotland in the 1990s, the term was first publicly used in the early 2000s to refer to a perceived new crime phenomenon emerging in England. Since then, its authority of reference has grown in such magnitude that the history of the label has been obscured. It has become such a matter-of-fact term in contemporary use that it functions as both a collective noun for knife related offences and an adjective denoting a criminal culture. British news headlines commonly reference ‘knife crime thugs’, ‘knife crime youths’ or ‘knife crime gangs’ without justification of the label’s meaning or the criteria of its attachment.

Meanwhile, government institutions, police, the justice system, and scholars, all consistently acknowledge difficulty in establishing a workable, evidence-based definition of ‘knife crime’ (Silvestri et al., 2009 ; Gliga 2009 ; Eades et al., 2007 ; Squires et al., 2008 ; Squires, 2011 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ). It was made clear in the Home Office Select Committee report on Knife Crime in 2009, that not only was there no legal definition of knife crime, but the phrase has been constructed by the press as a specific youth issue. They write, ‘ [t]here is no Home Office definition of 'knife crime'. The phrase was adopted by the media and is now popularly used to refer primarily to stabbings but also to the illegal carrying of knives by young people in a public place or on school premises’ (HASC 2009 , para. 4). It is somewhat surprising then, that the phrase continues to be used with great influence and authority in popular discourse, policing strategy, legislation, academic literature, and public policy.

The introduction of the ‘knife enabled’ police crime code by London’s Met Police in 2001 was an instrumental shift in the way offences with knives are recorded. This new ‘tick box’ in police crime recording systems became the statistical foundation for the crime category ‘knife crime’ that emerges in the early 2000s and begins a process of understanding youth violence through the weapon used for the first time in England and Wales. Along with blades, the definition of ‘knife enabled’ by the Home Office includes all sharp instruments such as screw drivers, broken bottles or glass and the data generated often makes no distinction between incidences of domestic violence, bar brawls, theft, sexual assault, or the age of the offender (Eades et al., 2007 ; HASC 2009 ).

The lack of a clear definition of ‘knife crime’, couple with the increased attention and proactive policing responses towards the phenomenon, have no doubt impacted on the data that is used to measure the problem. The police themselves have acknowledged that increases in stop and search can inflate official knife offence figures (Squires et al., 2008 , p. 20) and the toughening and extension of possession laws targeting knife carrying has been found to increase the likelihood of knife offences being committed by expanding the range of behaviours and actions considered criminal (Eades et al., 2007 ).

It is a fact that across all ages, knives continue to be the most frequently employed murder weapon in England and Wales (Brookman, 2005 ). They were employed in just over a third of all recorded homicides, involving both male and female victims, throughout the ten years to 2019. The ONS data showed that knives were also the most frequently employed weapon in cases of domestic violence (ONS, 2019 ). On overage two women are killed by a partner or former partner every week in England and Wales (ONS, 2015 ), and statistically children are far more likely to be killed by a parent than another young person (Silvestri et al., 2009 ). But despite adult violence in the home (where knives and sharp instruments are readily available) producing a large amount of ‘knife crime’ data, it is not considered a dominant context for knife crime research or a policy priority (Cook & Walklate, 2020 , p. 4).

It is also notable that homicide rates have steadily increased year on year since the 1950’s. However, within these figures, killing with a sharp instrument has remained a relatively constant proportion of all homicides including during the decade in which the panic over ‘knife crime’ first emerged (Eades et al., 2007 ). Looking at offensive knife use as a percentage of all violent offences from 1997 to 2007 it remained between 5 and 8% throughout the first alleged ‘knife crime epidemic’ (Eades et al., 2007 , p. 18). And examining the figures covering later phases of concern over ‘knife crime’ the same picture is revealed – between 2007–2017, knife use also remained between 5 and 8% of all violent offences (Allen & Audickas, 2018 ). Describing knife homicide and violent crime figures in isolation from their proportion of the total or rates of violent crime and domestic violence, is one way in which ‘knife crime’ data is commonly misrepresented as a growing youth problem.

Whilst the data included in the ‘knife crime’ category is broad, its application has increasingly narrowed. From 2006 onwards ‘knife crime’ became a crime label predominantly attached to the actions of a particular demographic; young, Black, inner-city males. Nowhere is this clearer than when then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, stated during a speech in 2007; ‘ In respect of knife and gun gangs… we won’t stop this by pretending it isn’t young black kids doing it ’ (UKPOL, 2007 ). With more violent overtones, in 2018 the BBC broadcast a Question Time audience member calling knife perpetrators ‘ a particular breed of human who… should be dealt with like the cancer they are and exterminated’ (Evans, 2018 ). The use of the label has become racially selective in the press, with analysis of ‘knife crime’ reports during the year of 2017 finding that in all national press other than The Guardian , the phrase ‘knife crime’ was only used to describe incidents when the victim was a ‘Black teen’ or child located in a city (Younge, 2018 ). If the label ‘knife crime’ is only applied to cases of knife enabled violence when the victim is young, Black and living in a city, it is not surprising that the category has come to be understood as a problem distinctly young, Black and urban – despite all evidence to the contrary.

Policing the crisis in the 1970s; ‘mugging’ revisited.

It is the argument of this paper that the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ since 2001 has combined existing social anxieties surrounding age and race to produce an enduring ‘criminal Other’ upon which state violence can be enacted and social order maintained. The construction of ‘Black youths’ as ‘criminal Other’ is a process that has been extensively researched elsewhere (White, 2020 ; Alexander, 2008 , Elliot-Cooper 2021 ; Jefferson, 1993 ; Pearson 1983; Gilroy, 1987 ; Williams, 2015 ). With attention to police crime-work in particular, Jefferson ( 1993 ) argues that all available evidence, historical and contemporary, is only compatible with the notion that policing ‘ consists, essentially, of reproducing a criminal Other utilising a discourse of criminality rooted in notions of differential crime proneness’ (Jefferson, 1993 , p. 27), in order to prevent oppressed groups become ‘dangerous classes’. Moving through various groups since the birth of modern policing in 1829, the ‘criminal Other’ has been periodically defined and redefined through class, ethnicity, age and gender with the most recent of these groups being young Black males (Jefferson, 1993 ; Pearson 1983).

Nowhere has this process and its function been more meticulously documented than in the seminal work of Hall et al. ( 1978 ) in ‘ Policing the Crisis ; Mugging, the state, and Law and Order’ . Here, Hall et al. ( 1978 ) unravel the construction of ‘mugging’ in the 1970s within the context of maintaining social order through moral consensus and public consent, despite the paradoxical inequality of social classes. The state’s powerful innovation of the ‘mugger’ as folk devil takes place at a crucial historic moment at which a national crisis in hegemony occurs. Hegemony, or ‘cultural hegemony’ is a political theory developed by Gramsci ( 2005 ) that refers to the way in which the contradictions of class inequality are maintained through a dominant culture that presents the interests of the powerful as inevitable social norms. By ‘winning them over’ hegemony exerts control over citizens without the need for direct force (Gramsci, 2005 ). However, the fragility of this coercion is prone to crisis and the management of hegemony requires constant adjustment.

The political decision made in the 1960s to commit Britain to prosperity through corporate neoliberal capitalism would guarantee the economic demise of the working class. Developing a Marxist and Gramscian analysis of hegemonic crisis in the 1960s, Hall et al. ( 1978 ) identify a major structural shift in the mechanisms of state intervention; ‘ the shift from a ‘consensual’ to a more ‘coercive’ management of the class struggle by the capitalist state ’ (ibid.). Increasing the rate of exploitation and extending the existing inequality would threaten the stability of class relations. To manage this challenge to hegemony the state had two main strategies. The first was to subsume ‘everyone into the ‘higher’ ideological unity of the national interest’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 236). This would combine the interests of labour and capital together as the interests of the state, making a social contract for ‘the national good’, thus the corporate strategy could be seen as in the interests of everyone (ibid.).

The second strategy involved the mobilisation of law and order into the spheres of civil society as the state of ‘exception’; a transition ‘from the ‘moment of consent’ through to the ‘moment of force’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 239). The exceptional form of state intervention is the open recruitment of the law in the defence of class interests for the benefit of the bourgeoisie class. However, this involves a great deal of risk for hegemony. By ‘ making the “invisible” inequality of the real relationship between workers and capitalists manifestly apparent… it risks exposing the central ideological mystification of the system, on which the consent of the masses to the reign of capital rests ’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 303). Hall et al. ( 1978 ) argue that it is only by thinking within this historical moment that we can begin to understand the emergence of ‘mugging’ as a particular interaction between crime and control. Applying this same method of conjunctural analysis to the events that defined ‘knife crime’ reveal significant similarities which will be explored later in this article.

It is the argument of Policing the Crisis (1978) that the crucial aspect of the response that enables this social function to be performed through ‘mugging’ is that it came to be ‘unambiguously assigned as a black crime’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 328). The construction of ‘mugging’ as a ‘Black crime’ happens through the amplification of incidents that fit this criteria and through targeted police mobilisation that geographically and ethnically locates the crime as ‘peculiar to black youth in the inner-city ‘ghettos’’ (Hall et al., 1978 , p. 329). Once assigned as a ‘Black crime’ the police maintain consent whilst using increasingly authoritative policing to preserve the class relations amid crisis.

Whilst the work of Hall et al. ( 1978 ) is widely lauded in criminology and beyond, their constructionist approach is crucially missing from our current understanding of ‘knife crime’. With exception of a few notable contributions (Squires,  2009 , 2011 ; Williams & Squires, 2021 ), existing academic literature on ‘knife crime’ assume the category as fact, paying little attention to the policing mobilisation that defines the emergence of the phrase (Williams & Squires, 2021 ). For example, when Eades et al. ( 2007 ) identify the non-existence of compiled ‘knife crime’ data prior to 2003 this is seen as an obstruction to quantifying the extent of the problem, rather than evidence of the temporality and subjectivity of the category itself. To understand the construction of ‘knife crime youths’ the inquiry must move from the persons and behaviours labelled as deviant, to the political actions, media communication and enforcement activities that defined the response to the act. What are the preconditions and social context in which the label ‘knife crime’ was first used and by whom? The conjuncture of interest in this analysis begins with the election of New Labour in Britain in 1997.

New Labour and the contradictions of a socially democratic authoritarianism.

Replicating the successes of Clinton’s Democratic Party in the 1993 US election, ‘ Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime ’ was one of New Labour’s election sound bites in 1997. Often referred to as ‘the third way’, New Labour offered a centralist political strategy that combined elements of the political left and right. Once elected, New Labour soon published their ‘ No More Excuses’ White Paper (Home Office, 1997 ), a policy reform that epitomised the party’s dual ethos of individual responsibility and government intervention. In this, the government detailed a complete youth crime policy and policing overhaul; radical and systemic changes to the youth justice system and policing all with the core aim of ‘tackling youth violence’ with tough measures.

In a preface to the white paper the then home secretary Jack Straw described the changes thus:

Today's young offenders can too easily become tomorrow's hardened criminals. As a society we do ourselves no favours by failing to break the link between juvenile crime and disorder and the serial burglar of the future… An excuse culture has developed within the youth justice system… implying that they cannot help their behaviour because of their social circumstances… we will refocus resources and the talents of professionals on nipping offending in the bud, to prevent crime from becoming a way of life for so many young people (Home Office, 1997 ).

The mobilisation towards youth surveillance and control, from the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) through to the Police Reform Act (2002), extended the capacity of the state to intervene and increased the range of behaviours considered criminal during this period. The emphasis on ‘pre-criminal’ behaviour and the increasing ease of issue and proliferation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) during this period shifts the direction of policing, the justice system and youth services towards a younger and broader sample of children. In addition to this, the devolution of power to local authorities, youth offending services and housing associations increases the number of institutions involved in the management of youth behaviours and movement.

Concern over youth delinquency and the construction of particular sub-groups of youths as ‘criminal Other’ has been a consistent feature of modern society; ‘ there has been a marked and recurring tendency to demonise certain categories of young people… This is especially so in respect of the working class youth and of ethnic minorities’ (Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 29). But the introduction of ASBOs and referral orders, along with the removal of Doli Incapax for very young adolescents , reflects a political shift in the conceptualisation of the transient status of young delinquency. Unlike the home office report of 1988 that found; ‘[m]ost young offenders grow out of crime as they become more mature and responsible’ (Home Office 1988, p 6, para. 2.15 quoted in Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 31), the New Labour of 1997 claimed ‘todays young offenders can easily become tomorrow’s hardened criminals’ (Home Office, 1997 quoted in Squires & Stephen, 2005 , p. 32).

This intensification of youth crime policy can be seen to reconcile the contradictions of New Labour’s dual strategy, an arena in which societal anxieties over youth provide a popular individualistic authoritarianism combined with proactive state interventions. At a pragmatic level, children are an advantageous subject group to be acted upon; they can’t vote, are a relatively voiceless group politically, and remain a reliable source of emotive concern amongst the electorate (Pitts, 2001 ). But the symbolic potential of ‘youth crime’ in the hegemonic management of neoliberalism is exemplified in the ‘no excuses’ reform.

On the one hand, the hardening of state response to disorder in the streets appeals to a colonial nationalism of the past; an imperialist imagination of ‘Britishness’ as a civilising force (Gilroy, 1987 ). On the other, it appeals to the ideology of modernisation; a youth justice reform that increases efficiency and coordinates services in a more productive way. Beyond this, the devolution of youth justice to local authorities and YOTs acted to distance government from economic accountability whilst increasing the capacity for localised authoritarianism and prolonged institutionalised intervention.

It is significant to note however, that at no point in the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), The MacPherson Inquiry ( 1999 ), the ‘Blueprint for Reform’ White Paper (2001), the first National Policing Plan (2002), The Policing Reform Act (2002) or any of the parliamentary acts of this period do the words ‘knife crime’ appear. But behind the scenes there are early signs of a mobilisation specifically towards knives (e.g., the 1997 Knives Act that outlawed the marketing of knives for combat and authorised the use Sect. 60 ‘no grounds’ searches when ‘knife enabled violence’ was anticipated). Perhaps the most significant change occurs in 2001 when a new policing ‘feature code’ is introduced to the police system of the Met Police to specifically register ‘knife enabled offences’ (KEO) on computerised crime records.

Prior to the feature code of ‘knife enabled offence’ being added, crimes that had included or intimated a knife would have been recorded and prioritised base on the intent referenced in the ‘opening code’. For example; Burglary, theft, sexual assault, drugs or criminal damage would be the defining category of the offence. But after the feature code of KEO is added data analysts and police supervisors are able to extract crime figures from across different opening codes to prioritise those with a feature code for ‘knife enabled’. For the first time it is possible to redact crime data based on whether a ‘knife’ was present, used or intimated during various different crime contexts.

The data collected from this new crime code is immediately put to use and is reported on by police and the press as early as 2002 (Alleyne, 2002 ; Bamber, 2002 ). By the end of 2003 there is a discourse emerging that identifies ‘knife crime’ as a distinct category for concern in England and Wales. The analysis of the label’s first uses suggests that three combined factors are influential in this development. Firstly, the rural school setting of a teen murder in November 2003 will secure national interest and invigorate coverage of knife-related crimes within particular contexts. Secondly, high news value is sustained and cultivated for this emerging category by the focus on younger children and a broad range of authorised spokespeople. Thirdly, the narrative that links crime through the knife insinuates or openly identifies a criminogenic ‘knife culture’ amongst young people that becomes an argument for proactive interventions at that time. A significant case in the early public use of the phrase ‘knife crime’ is the murder of Luke Walmsley in 2003, a close analysis of the evolving reports of this incident demonstrates how the label came to be defined through ‘youth’.

Making of knife crime youth; the case of Luke Walmsley

On 4 th November 2003, the murder of 14-year-old Luke Walmsley in a school corridor in rural Lincolnshire becomes a catalyst for a co-ordinated response to a perceived culture rising amongst young people across the country. The day following his death, the case is given high news status in both national and regional papers. Headlines include:

‘BOY, 14, KILLED IN SCHOOL ATTACK: He ran .. then he fell ; PUPILS FLEE IN TERROR AS LUKE KNIFED ON HIS WAY TO LESSON’ (McComish et al., 2003 ) in The Daily Mirror ‘A scuffle, then panic grips children and staff at village school; Chief constable pledges support for community in shock’ (Laville, 2003 ) in The Daily Telegraph . ‘Youngsters Caught in Tide of Horror’ (Barker, 2003 ) in The Sun.

The tabloid language used to describe the incident, ‘terror’, ‘panic’ and ‘horror’, are embellishments that significantly sensationalise the coverage. Early reporting focuses heavily on school safety, seeking teachers’ opinions on pupil violence and their powers to prevent another event like this. In an effort to include the ‘teachers’ perspective’ and with no official statement from Luke Walmsley’s school yet, the coverage the day after the murder widely quotes a response made by David Hart, General Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. The full quote reads:

My reaction is one of utter horror. To think a youngster can be stabbed to death in a school in a relatively quiet part of the country will send shockwaves through the school system. It does demonstrate very clearly the fact that although this level of violence is very rare, there are an incredible number of youngsters who are willing to sign up to the knife culture and bring an offensive weapon into school (David Hart quoted in ‘Classmates See…’ 2003 ).

As the only official statement available, this immediate anecdotal connection made by Hart between the isolated incident of Luke Walmsley and a ‘knife culture’ with ‘incredible numbers’ or young people willingly ‘signing up’, instigates a public debate on what the national response to Luke’s death should be. Within two days of Luke’s murder the conversation shifts from the incident at a school in Lincolnshire to include knives and schools in general. On the 6 th of November, The Guardian reports ‘Unions call for review of security’ with representatives of teachers split on what the course of action should be.

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) warned that crime involving weapons was ‘spilling over from the streets into schools’ and that a working party on school security should be assembled. Parent-teacher associations were equally pro-active, suggesting the installation of metal detectors in schools to stop students ‘attempting to smuggle in knives and guns’. Police demonstrate their position with action, deploying 100 extra officers to ‘ patrol the playgrounds of British schools identified as breeding grounds for young offenders ’ (Goodchild, 2003 ).

The evocative and metaphoric language used by reliable spokespeople at this time is widely reported and is indicative of a developing narrative—In which the knife is seen as an outside threat, based in the street, but ‘spilling into’ or being ‘smuggled’ in to the safe spaces of schools. The police describing schools as ‘breeding grounds’ for criminality is an early indication that the perceived threat of contagious influence from one type of young person will be formative in the response that will come to define ‘knife crime’.

Other public voices presented disagreement with the proactive measures taken and feared that the frequency of violence in schools was being exaggerated in the hastiness of the response. The then Schools Secretary Minister, David Miliband, was reported as cautioning against ‘knee-jerk reactions’ to the school-time incident, stating; ‘ the death of Luke Walmsley at his Lincolnshire school was not evidence of rising violence throughout the education system’ (‘Call for Caution…’ 2003 ). The general secretary of the National Union of Teachers concurred, saying ‘This is an absolutely tragic incident, but there are 7.5 million children in our schools 190 days a year and our surveys show the number of weapons being brought into our schools is absolutely minuscule’ (ibid . ). The chairman of the Youth Justice Board warned that over-reacting could exasperate the issue saying; ‘it's a great tragedy when you start making schools into fortresses. It creates a fear culture and this can beget even more problems’ (Goodchild, 2003 ).

What is significantly absent in these debates on the urgency of the problem, is supporting data. Although plenty of anecdotal evidence is offered, the early reports lack any statistics that present knives as specifically a ‘youth’ or ‘school’ problem. There is concerted effort by journalists across the country to produce valid evidence of the scale of the problem whilst public concern is still high. Birmingham city council announces their investigation to find out if violence is increasing in schools (‘Call for Caution…’ 2003 ). The Sunday Mirror runs their own experiments in Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool; Sending children to buy knives at high-street shops and publishing the results (Ellam, 2003 ). The BBC online publishes the article; ‘Is knife crime really getting worse’ (Lane & Wheeler, 2003 ) in an attempt to collate available data. Meanwhile, The Observer is conducting its own investigation and publishes its findings on the 23 rd of November 2003 (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). This is the first news article reporting on Luke Walmsley that uses the phrase ‘knife crime’.

Opting for the sensationalist headline; ‘ Scandal of pupils aged five carrying knives ’ the findings of the Observer investigation consolidate the idea that Luke wasn’t the victim of an isolated attack, but the latest casualty in a national ‘epidemic’ in which ‘nowhere is safe’ (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). Amongst other shocking statistics the Observer lists four other young people involved in knife related news since Luke’s death, two stabbings, one knife carrying in school and one court case currently at trial. The specific circumstances of these incidents are not described, the cases are not viewed in isolation but as one collective crime; ‘knife crime’.

In the chain of events from Luke Walmsley’s death to the collective grouping of incidents as ‘knife crime’, what is striking is the constitutive power of ‘youth’ in the making of the label. It is the school setting and the notion of a threat to children that provides the initial momentum that will eventually link crimes together by virtue of age and type of weapon. Rather than acts of ‘knife crime’ being a phenomenon exclusive to youths, they are actions only defined as phenomenal when connected to young people.

Exploring this aspect further it has been evidenced through media studies that violence continues to hold a dominant news value but not as much as it used to;

…violence has become so ubiquitous that – although still considered newsworthy it is frequently reported in a routine, mundane manner with little follow-up or analysis. Unless a story involving violence conforms to several other news values or provides a suitable threshold to keep alive an existing set of stories, even the most serious acts of violence may be used as ‘fillers’ consigned to the inside pages of a newspaper (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 63,64).

Many instances of non-fatal stabbings, threatening with knives, knife carrying and knife homicides were not considered to have news value before the emergence of ‘knife crime’. However, in the early stages of the phenomenon building, the age of the victims and perpetrators seems to get younger and younger and with this added value the breadth of actions considered newsworthy increases. Luke Walmsley was 14 and this was an alarming fact, but by the end of the same month headlines are connecting the case with 5 year olds carrying knives (Townsend & Barnett, 2003 ). This pursuit of youth in the making of ‘knife crime’ reflects the evolving priorities, sensitivities and interests of media audiences and news reporting techniques as much as it does any changes in youth crime.

In the days following the stabbing, news headlines of national newspapers, in response to Luke Walmsley, focus on ‘kids’, ‘children’ and ‘school’ as they extrapolate from one case to a national crisis. Within one week the headlines included:

‘Kids carry knives and hammers: they have to look after themselves’ (Johnson, 2003a ) ‘ Is your kid taking a knife to school ?’ (Johnson, 2003b ). ‘ Shops, stalls and web illegally sell knives to children’ ( Woolcock, 2003 ). ‘ SOLD.. TO A 12-YR-OLD; Shop charges £25 for this 12in blade. Boy of 14 is stabbed to death but stores still flout law on children buying knives.’ (Ellam, 2003 ). ‘ Not even your school is safe ’ (‘Not Even…’ 2003 ).

The case of Luke Walmsley in 2003 triggers a media response that brings together authorized spokespeople, such as high-ranking police officers and heads of teaching associations, providing a public definition of ‘knife crime’ for the first time. Sustaining news value, the media utilizes photographic imagery and newly available crime data, propelled by proactive policing operations, to ‘keep the story alive’. At this stage in the history of the label it is predominantly young age and a public setting that defines the parameters of the category, but this begins to change over the following years as ‘knife crime youths’ are increasingly constructed as Black and located within inner cities. A significant turning point identified in this research, is the reporting of the murder of Tom Rhys-Pryce – a white lawyer killed in north London by two young Black men in 2006.

Making knife crime a ‘Black crime’; the case of Tom Rhys-Pryce

It is widely recognised that the syntax of British racism is complex and ever changing (Gilroy, 1987 ; Solomos & Back, 1996 ), producing symbolic representations of difference that evade scrutiny through everyday use and sensibility. ‘Race’ itself has no ontological or biological meaning, only that which is continually assigned and reassigned through processes of racialisation or ‘race making’ (Murji & Solomos, 2005 ). In other words, racial difference exists only so long as it is produced and reproduced in daily encounters, language, and interactions. The analysis presented here will suggest that ‘knife crime’ became a vessel for contemporary racism through a veiled and discreet language of cultural deficit—an adapted form of ‘slippery racism’ (Solomos & Back, 1996 ) equipped for policing the crisis in the 21 st century.

It is not until 2006 that ‘knife crime’ is frequently and openly defined through ethnicity and begins to be understood as a ‘Black crime’. Earlier mentions of race were more likely to insinuate a racial dynamic such as; a think piece that centers on a youth project that specializes in working with Black adolescents (Lane & Wheeler, 2003 ), describing a victim as a ‘Somali boy’ despite not including the nationality or ethnicity of others in the article (Johnston, 2001 ), or criticizing Black music genres for promoting ‘gangster’ culture and glamourizing knives (Weathers, 2005 ). But at the end of 2006 there are increasing discussions of ‘knife crime’ in relation to ‘Black communities’ within arguments for the reinstatement of stop and search to its pre-Macpherson freedoms.

The analysis of the articulation of ‘knife crime’ during 2006 suggests that one catalyst for this narrative shift is a growing social anxiety amongst suburban middle classes. This increasing concern is exemplified in the intensification of ‘knife crime’ news in response to a particular murder in London in January 2006. Tom Rhys Pryce was a wealthy white lawyer killed by two working class Black teenagers near his home in north London. The disproportionate amount of coverage given to this case is so extreme at the time that the new police commissioner Ian Blair, evoking the language of the MacPherson inquiry (MacPherson, 1999 ), accuses the media press of ‘institutional racism’. He cites the deaths of several victims from ethnic minorities that happened on the same day that only ‘got a paragraph on page 97’ in comparison (Gibson & Dodd, 2006 ).

In attempt to find witnesses, the police release a statement to the press describing the suspects as two Black males. Below are the headlines that were published within 24 hours of the incident, followed by how the article included the ethnicity of the suspects.

The Evening Standard 13 th January 2006:

‘CITY LAWYER IS MURDERED BY MUGGERS; Call to fiancée, then attack on way home’ …

‘Police said members of the public witnessed the struggle between two black men and the victim’ (‘City lawyer…’ 2006 )

Birmingham Post 14 th January 2006:

‘Muggers Brutally Murder Lawyer… ’.

‘Detectives believe he had been trying to defend himself when the two young black men launched their "ferocious" assault. They stabbed him in the head, torso and hands and left him dying on the pavement’ (Dean and Marsden, 2006 )

The Daily Mail 14 th January 2006:

‘NO MERCY; Highflying young lawyer knifed to death outside his flat AFTER handing everything to muggers…’

‘Police said the lawyer was ambushed by two black men as he walked home from a local station after attending a social event with colleagues on Thursday night’ (Wright & Koster, 2006 )

The Daily Mirror 14 th January 2006:

‘HIS LIFE; He gave muggers all his possessions but they wanted more…’

‘Officers were yesterday retrieving CCTV footage from several cameras in the area in a bid to trace the killers - two black men thought to be in their 20s’ (Edwards and Parry, 2006 )

The Sun 14 th January 2006:

‘Mugged… and then stabbed to death…’

‘Smartly-dressed Tom had been stabbed in the head, body and hands. He had been robbed of his wallet by two young black men as he walked to his home in Kensal Green, North West London, from the local Tube station. Police say the killing was unprovoked’ (Sullivan, 2006 )

Only one of the papers references the ethnicity of the perpetrators in connection with the police investigation to find the killers (Edwards and Parry, 2006 ) The others use ‘Black’ as part of the description of the incident – none of them mention the ethnicity of the victim, his whiteness is assumed. Unlike the death of Luke Walmsley, where news value was increased by the young age of the victim and school setting, Tom Rhys Pryce is front-page worthy because of the contrast between his social class and the setting of his death. It is more shocking (and thus more newsworthy) for a ‘smartly-dressed’, ‘highflying’, ‘city lawyer’ to die in a public rupture of violence given that the privileges of his class should protect from such scenarios (Gekowski et al., 2012 ). However, the middle classes in London were increasingly finding themselves confronted with the conditions of disadvantage on their doorstep. This murder is symbolic of a particular anxiety and sociological dilemma during this moment.

At the time of Tom Rhys-Pryce’s murder, London is experiencing a period of fast-paced gentrification across many prime commuter areas of the city that were previously dominated by publicly owned housing stock. The mass movement of affluent middle-class families to working-class areas of the city was facilitated by the ‘right to buy’ initiatives, started by the Conservative government in the 1980s, but extended under New Labour ‘regeneration’ housing policies of the late 1990s and 2000s. Giving council tenants the ‘right to buy’ council houses transferred housing stock to private ownership or private sector management.

Once locations were targeted for regeneration the number of council owned properties rapidly decreased. Between the 1981 and 2001 census the number of households in council owned properties in the Borough of Tower Hamlets reduced from 82 to 37.4%, whilst Lambeth dropped from 43.2 to 28.5% (Watt, 2009 ). Gentrification was actively encouraged by New Labour, depicted as a solution to the ‘social ills’ of previously ‘hard-to-reach’, deprived urban neighbourhoods, especially public housing estates (Watt, 2009 ). This state led ‘affluent drift’ into deprived urban areas in conditions of ‘managed decline’ (Beaumont, 2006 ), was also racially distinct. The areas typified by ‘intense and extensive deprivation’ were also areas of London with a ‘large black African/Caribbean population’ (Watt, 2009 ).

The murder of Tom Rhys Pryce takes please in Kensal Green within the Borough of Brent, a district selected for state-led gentrification in 1999 under the New Deal for Communities (NDC) funded development scheme. Within this scheme, the reduction of crime rates in the gentrified area is considered a key indicator of success (Batty et al.,  2010 , p. 24). The privately and publicly funded project boasts ‘an enhanced police service and neighbourhood warden scheme’ (Batty et al., 2010 , p. 15) in its districts. Implementing a partnership with local police the NDC ‘ supplemented mainstream police budgets in order to fund more police and police community support officers, and to provide a flexible additional resource through which the police can respond to trouble ‘hotspots’’ (ibid . ).

There are two articles in the Evening Standard on 16 th January 2006 that recognise the gentrification context of the murder in Kensal Green but to different effect. In language that conjures images of gentrifying as brave new settlers on the London’s uncivilised frontiers, Gilligan writes:

As the middle classes have pressed ever westward, the onward march into new territory has brought prosperous, professional London hard up against the toughest areas in the capital. For all the political flannel about inclusiveness and multiculturalism, London has some of Europe's most savage inequalities of status and wealth. Sandwiched between North Kensington and Harlesden, Kensal Green puts those inequalities side by side (Gilligan, 2006 ).

Gilligan goes on to point out that the area has always had violent stabbings, but without the ‘men in suits [they] did not attract the attention of the media’ (ibid.). In contrast Paul Barker, writing in the same paper, suggests the presence of men in suits increases the frequency of jealous violent crime:

Some social changes make confrontations more likely. Entire swathes of London - where once you'd have to scour around to find a single middleclass achiever - are busily being gentrified. This puts the well-off bang next door to the envious poor or the wholly criminal (Barker, 2006 ).

However, as Gilligan pointed out violent confrontations were not ‘more likely’, only more likely to involve the middle classes – and therefore more likely to be reported; both to the police and in the press. Barker goes further in this article, proposing the best solution for supressing the poor from attacking the wealthy is to ‘[s]tep up stop-and-search’, on the basis that ‘ [a]fter the stabbing by muggers of lawyer Tom Rhys Pryce, we shouldn't be afraid to extend controversial police powers on our streets’ (Barker, 2006 ). It is this latter response to crimes within areas in the process of gentrification that will gain momentum by the end of 2006, endorsing and expanding policing operations and search powers in identified ‘knife crime hot spots’.

This is a significantly different moment in London’s social history then that which Hall et al. described in Policing the Crisis (1978), and yet here the continuations between ‘mugging’ and ‘knife crime’ are apparent. It is these same inner rings of London that are in contestation. These are the previously ‘sub-standard and decaying’ areas, the only spaces made available to the newly arrived Caribbean workforce invited to rebuild post-war Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 342). Treated with such hostility and racism by the English these areas were transformed into enclosed safe spaces for Black families and communities; ‘for a ‘ West Indian Culture’ to take root and survive in Britain, it required a solid framework and a material base: the construction of a West Indian enclave community – the birth of colony society’ (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 344). The ‘colonisation’ of streets, neighbourhoods, markets and cafes in the 1960s suburbs were features of a community defending itself from the public racism on the outside.

In the story of ‘mugging’ this collective capacity for a Black social and cultural existence is considered by the powerful to be a dangerous consolidation of class and race, geographically facilitated by ‘colony life’ into a revolutionary ‘militant consciousness’ (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 326). It is this anxiety for which the label ‘mugging’ became a means of justification, proving a reason to enter, supervise and brutalise young Black people in these communities (Hall et al.,  1978 , p. 351). Thirty years later these culturally rich urban areas, with colourful markets and lively high-streets, now become attractive to the commuter-class looking for large family homes within a short train ride from the city centre. Under the new label ‘knife crime’, police re-enter the former-Black colonies on behalf of the new white settlers, facilitating the occupation through interrupting and hassling young Black men in the street and searching their bodies in ritual humiliation. To some extent ‘knife crime’ has always represented an anxiety about the control of public spaces, but the resurgence of stop and search in these areas at this time is a clear performance of who is welcome and who is not, who is citizen and who is ‘ Other’ .

The reporting of the case of Tom Rhys Pryce is a pivotal moment in ‘knife crime’s social history, in which the ethnicity of the assailant becomes formative in the explanation of the crime in the press. This crucial shift towards ‘knife crime’ as a racialised crime category becomes embedded in the rhetoric of a ‘knife culture’ in following years (Sveinsson, 2008 ). By insinuating race in discussions of ‘knife crime youths’ and ‘knife culture’ from 2006 onwards, the label becomes a mechanism for communicating racial difference in more ‘politically correct’ language – a form of ‘new racism’ (Barker, 1981 ) or ‘cultural racism’ (Gilroy, 1987 ) where inferiority is inferred as cultural deficit rather than biology or genetics.

Conclusion; policing the crisis in the 21 st century

Using a radical criminological understanding of ‘knife crime’ as a particular response to criminality, this paper has analysed the significant events that constructed ‘knife crime youths’ in Britain. In many ways, ‘knife crime’ can be seen as a continuation of Policing the Crisis as detailed by Hall et al. ( 1978 ), renewed for the 21st century. As with ‘mugging’, ‘knife crime’ is presented as a new crime category on the rise, despite sharp instrument offences making up a consistent proportion of violent crime for the past two decades. As in the 1970s, the gradual construction of ‘knife crime’ as a racialised crime type works to justify the extension of police powers and maintains hegemonic consent, even as the generational harm of neoliberal social policies become increasingly apparent.

The explicit racialisation of knife crime from 2006 onwards makes the application of the label even more narrow, with knife crime now overtly considered a ‘Black youth crime’. The abstraction of race from other factors such as poverty, geographical location, social environment and marginalisation, reinforce a sense of racial neoliberalism (Kapoor, 2013 ). In which disadvantaged young Black people are considered the cause of their own misfortune and perceptions of cultural deficit are used to justify the structural violence of extreme inequality. This is particularly significant considering the deepening inequality in the UK over past decades (Berry,  2016 ) and demonstrates how constructs of ‘Black criminality’ can be ‘put to work’ yet again, to manage the contradictions and crises of neoliberal capitalism.

However, there are also distinct differences between the 1970s and the 2000s. More so than ‘mugging’, the conceptualisation of ‘knife crime’ relies on its association with younger aged youths. It is the sustained news value achieved by combining youth and knife violence that established this crime label in the first instance. Knife crimes committed by adults, even when they are against children or young people, do not qualify for the same attention as those between ‘youths’. Also, unlike ‘mugging’ in the 1970s, ‘knife crime’ can be seen to navigate the new terrains of acceptable racisms through a language of difference attributed to ‘culture’.

The distinct change in political direction heralded by New Labour in the 1990s may have continued the same underlying neoliberal conjuncture that preceded it, but the re-articulation of consensus through the ‘third way’ presented new challenges for hegemonic management. New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ youth policy reforms worked through many of the contradictions of a social democratic authoritarianism. However, it is through race, yet again, that consent for exceptional policing can be found. Excessive and disproportionate policing powers, justified through fear of ‘knife crime youths’, continue to be mobilised against working class communities. Thus, the widely unchallenged racialisation of ‘knife crime’ remains vital in hegemonic management of 21 st Century Britain.

The analysis of the formation of the ‘knife crime’ label depicted here suggests several reasons why this construction has received relatively little critique by practitioners and academics since its conception. The gradually narrowing definition of the label from a ‘youth problem’ in 2003 to a ‘young, Black, inner-city problem’ by 2006, made the construction less noticeable and appear more common-sensical. In addition to this, the analysis has retraced the mobilisation towards ‘knife crime’ within the broader political context of vast youth policy reform by New Labour, that centred ‘nearly criminal’ or ‘pre-criminal’ youths. Within this discourse ‘something had to be done’ and proactive policing strategies targeting young people had become normalised with cross-party consensus. Finally, it has been argued here that overtly racist language around ‘Black criminality’ had evolved into more discreet forms at the start of the 21 st century. In the new terrains of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘political correctness’, ‘knife crime youths’ became a synonym for ‘Black youths’ without the need to explicitly mention race.

As the neoliberal conjuncture extends uninterrupted into the 21 st century, the deepening inequality and the increased suffering of the working classes in Britain requires ongoing ideological management. The construction of ‘knife crime youths’, first through age and then through urban location and race, has been a highly effective means of social management; providing consent for police occupation of newly gentrified areas of the neoliberal city and continuing public support for the state of exception through times of economic instability. The introduction of KCPOs in 2019 and the extension of Sect. 60 search powers in 2022 suggest we have not seen the end of ‘knife crime youths’ as a mechanism for policing the crisis .

Data availability

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

This the closest comparison to the 11 to 25 age category of ‘youth’ that available NHS data allows.

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Williams, P. (2015). Criminalising the other: Challenging the race-gang nexus. Race & Class, 56 (3), 18–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396814556221

Woolcock, N. (2003, November 6). Shops, stalls and web illegally sell knives to children. The Daily Telegraph . London (UK).

Wright & Koster. (2006, January 14). No mercy; Highflying young lawyer knifed to death outside his flat AFTER handing everything to muggers. Daily Mail . UK.

Younge, G. (2018, June 21). The radical lessons of a year reporting on knife crime. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/jun/21/radical-lessons-knife-crime-beyond-the-blade . Accessed 24 May 2022.

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Williams, E. Policing the Crisis in the 21 st Century; the making of “knife crime youths” in Britain. Crime Law Soc Change (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10089-8

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Science & Technology in Policing

Inside essex police's battle against knife violence.

Knife crime is presenting a large and complex challenge for police forces across the country. Instead of focusing only on investigating crime after it has occurred, Essex Police have looked at innovative ways to predict and prevent future crime, benefitting communities and individuals across the county.  

Although they have no crystal ball, Essex Police have come up with new methods of predicting crime, which involves a lot of complex and interesting algorithms—if only Hercule Poirot had this capability too! 

Last year Essex Police developed the Knife Crime and Violence Model (KCVM), which sought to identify individuals who are known to the police, and to predict which of them are likely to commit new knife or violent offences in the next 12 months. Data scientists from Essex Police worked in partnership with the University of Essex to develop a unique algorithm for the project, and tests were then carried out on the full model over 18 months to deliver accurate predictions of risk. A business process was also developed with the Essex Centre for Data Analytics , and the Essex Violence and Vulnerability Unit . The strong collaboration is a compelling reason why the whole project was successful, as different capabilities and strengths were supported to create such an effective model.   

The data model tool assigns a risk score against individuals known to the police, so it predicts whether an individual is on the path towards using a knife to commit a crime or act of violence. Individuals are given probability scores based on factors such as age, gender, number of criminal associates, prior suspects for violence with injury, and prior victimisation for violence with injury.  

Who is using the model?

The model is used by specially trained staff in multiple agencies to assess the individuals at heightened risk of becoming involved in knife crime and violence, to allow support services to be deployed. The aim is then to support the individuals’ exit from criminality, as well as to prevent future harm to others. Stopping crime before it happens has numerous benefits for the individuals and communities, and means that those needing support can be given it. The model is named Fearless Futures , as it aims to give people alternative futures away from crime and violence.   

As part of the KCVM, a Standard Operating Procedure was developed, which also assesses the priority levels of those flagged by the KCVM before they are referred, in order to tackle the most serious cases effectively.

What is next for the Knife Crime and Violence Model?

The KCVM is recommended to be expanded to trial through a longer period of time, with more locations added to obtain more evidence and to analyse the data and offending behaviours prior to and during engagement. This is a positive beginning for an innovative way to approach knife crime, hopefully with a view to reducing crime and supporting individuals in need.  

*Details in this article were accurate as of March 2023

A History Of Violence: The Story Of U.K. Knife Crime So Far

• Remy Roberts
• May 1, 2020
• No Comments

Before COVID-19, another epidemic had been sweeping the U.K.: knife crime. The extent of this social disease was revealed last week, when the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced that 45,627 knife offences had been carried out in England and Wales in 2019. This was the highest annual number since records began. The figure is 7% higher than in 2018 – a record year in its own right. Perhaps one of the grimmest aspects of this latest development is how unsurprising it is. Reminders of the gruesome reality of British knife crime have become a regular feature of the national news cycle. With each new incident and statistic, the government, activists and experts claim lessons need to be learnt. Last week’s figures suggest that they still haven’t been. This all begs the question, how did things get so bad?

Escalating Violence

In March 2014, knife crime in the U.K. was at a historic low point. The ONS announced that 23,945 offences had been committed over the previous year, nearly half the 2019 total. This news led Archie Bland, of The Independent, to ask whether the ‘‘knife-crime epidemic’’ (that had seen 21 people stabbed in a single day in 2008) was finally over. His article now reads as bleak foreshadowing. Knife-related offences in England and Wales began rising again in 2015. The increase was gradual at first, but by 2017 the number per year had risen by 50%. However, the number of offences in Scotland continued to fall. In 2015, crimes north of the border involving offensive weapons had fallen to their lowest point in 31 years. Conviction rates for people under 19 carrying weapons had also decreased by 82% since 2006/7. These contrasting fortunes, and their causes, would become a hot button political issue over the coming years.

The Scottish Model vs the Rest of Britain

But why was the story in Scotland so different from the rest of Britain? One possible answer is Scotland’s policing policy. In 2005, 83 homicides were committed in Glasgow as the WHO labelled the city as the ‘‘murder capital of Europe.’’Scottish authorities responded to this violence by establishing the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). The VRU was unique in that it treated knife crime as a public health issue rather than just a policing issue. Its aim was to prevent violence by tackling its social roots. The VRU worked with the NHS and social services to nurture those who were likely to join a gang: youths from poorer backgrounds and those who had been left behind by the education system. It introduced the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) scheme to schools to teach young people to be kind to other students. The VRU also worked with businesses to provide young people with jobs and other opportunities. This holistic ethos has governed the country’s response to the issue ever since with undeniably positive results.

The U.K.’s coalition government took a very different approach to curbing knife crime. Its main strategy was to clamp down on gangs. This meant introducing new laws against anti-social behaviour, injunctions against suspected gang members and harsher criminal sentencing. The government’s approach remained largely unchanged until 2018. In April that year, after repeated calls for the whole of the U.K. to adopt the VRU’s model, Theresa May’s government published a ‘Serious Violence Strategy’ that shifted the focus of knife crime policy to early intervention. It then announced plans in October 2018 to introduce a public health approach to violent crime, as Scotland had done 13 years earlier. This change of tack will take time to make a difference. Its focus on youth engagement means we will hopefully see benefits in the years to come. However, the continuing increase in knife offences suggests that other issues, beyond government strategy, are contributing to the current levels of violence.

A Social Problem?

Former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips has claimed that cultural issues have fuelled knife-related offences. Phillips has argued that this connection becomes clear when we look at the demographics of those involved. The victims and perpetrators of knife crime are disproportionately young BAME men in urban areas. According to the ONS, a third of knife offences in 2019 took place in London. 61.5% of these cases involved people under 24 and 25% of the victims were black. Phillips and his supporters, such as writer Mutaz Ahmed, see gang culture, certain types of music such as drill and grime, and the lack of assimilation in immigrant communities as the drivers behind these skewed figures. They claim that political correctness has left these problems go unchallenged at the expense of saving lives.

However, Phillips’ argument fails to adequately explain why knife crime has risen specifically within the last few years. The issues he has raised are not new. David Cameron declared an ‘‘all-out war’’ on gangs back in 2011. Drill and grime have been around since the start of the decade or earlier. So why the spike in cases since 2015? Blaming music for the corruption of youths is also a tried and overly simplistic trope. While many MCs have promoted gang-like behaviour, others including Drillminister and Akala have used their voice to urge young people to avoid violence. Where do artists like these fit into Phillips’ argument? It seems, therefore, that while the factors highlighted by Phillips should not be dismissed, they aren’t enough to account for changes in knife crime trends by themselves.

Or the Result of Underfunded Policing?

Another explanation of the current crisis is the lack of public investment in policing over the last decade. In an interview with the Financial Times, Cambridge criminology lecturer Peter Neyroud linked the rise of U.K. knife crime to government austerity. Between 2011 and 2018, 20% of the police budget was cut and 20,000 officers lost their job. Neyroud believed that the violence on Britain’s streets showed that the government’s ‘‘chickens [were] coming home to roost.’’ Theresa May dismissed this suggestion in 2019 and denied any association between police cuts and knife crime. However, leaked reports from her own government stated that decreasing police numbers have ‘likely contributed’ to the rise in violent crime.

Upon coming to power, the actions of Boris Johnson’s administration clearly indicated that it accepts austerity’s role in the crisis. It promised to pump another £1.1 billion and put another 20,000 police officers the street. Recently it also announced plans to recruit a further 6,000 officers. Nevertheless, John Apter, the chair of the Police Federation, believes these measures are still not enough. Quoted in the Mail, Apter lamented that the number of policemen and their funding is still barely above 2008 levels. It seems that state officials and experts finally agree that a lack of public investment has contributed to the escalation of knife crime. It is now up to the government to match this realization with investment that goes beyond just undoing the harm caused by austerity.

A Potential Way Forward

Finding a definitive cause of the U.K.’s knife crime epidemic is immensely complicated. Finding a solution is even more so. Adopting the VRU’s model is an encouraging starting point, but its effects will only be seen in the long-term. In the meantime, more victims of violence are dying year on year, especially young people in urban areas. Addressing the cultural issues that likely play into violence amongst this demographic may help turn them away from crime. However, these youths are not responsible for all of the U.K.’s knife crime, nor do cultural factors explain why cases have skyrocketed in the last 5 years. Increasing the number of police might also make a difference. The state has made a positive decision in stepping up police funding, but far more will be needed. These issues all appear to feed into our current crisis. Only with a coherent and extensive government response that addresses them all might we finally see some light at the end of the tunnel.

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Knife Crime Stories

We share the devastating real stories of young people who were murdered, so everyone understands the pain and suffering that can be caused when someone chooses to carry a knife.

Ben Kinsella | Knife Crime Stories

Abdul Aziz Ansari | Knife Crime Stories

Olly Stephens | Knife Crime Stories

Duran Kajiama | Knife Crime Stories

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Lived  experiences

Every day, we work with and speak to people all over Scotland who’ve been affected by knife crime. The victims, those who’ve been convicted for carrying knives, and the loved ones on both sides.

Here's a collection of their  stories

Sam's story.

Lynn Burn’s son Sam was murdered in Ayrshire in 2013 and died from a single stab wound to his chest.

Amanda's story

Amanda was 18 when she was charged and sentenced to 22 months in Cornton Vale Prison for possession of a knife.

Lisa's story

Influenced by drink and drugs, Lisa spiralled into a life of violence and knife crime. As a result she lost care of her son and spent time in prison.

John's story

John began carrying a knife at 16 after an assault. He ended up in and out of young offenders institutes and was seriously injured in fights.

Anonymous knife interview

A former knife carrier explains how they got involved in knife crime and the consequences of their choices.

Anonymous alcohol interview

The story of how an alcohol addiction consumed one person’s life and led to crime, violence and harm caused to loved ones.

Steven's story

Steven was left disabled by an unprovoked knife attack by a stranger while withdrawing money from a cash machine.

Scott's story

Scott was left paralysed from the neck down when he was the victim of an unprovoked knife attack aged just 16-years-old.

UK Knife Crime

What is happening what can we do.

What are the effects of knife crime on victims?

Stephen is a victim of a knife attack which happened in 2005 that resulted in 8 major operations and his leg being amputated. Alongside this the attack mentally impacted him negatively, resulting in suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and a loss of direction within his own life. The road to recovery for Stephen was difficult and is never ending, this attack will always have an impact on him. (No Knives, Better Lives, 2019)

How does knife crime affect the offenders?

Amanda was an individual whom committed knife related offences upon others. She speaks of the impact of the conviction has had on her life and why she chose to pick up a knife. As an 18 year-old Amanda was sentenced to 22 months in prison for possessing a knife. She claims she carried the knife for self-protection after a dispute. Though she did not use the weapon to harm another, possession of it alone resulted in her arrest and consequential conviction. The impact of this conviction has resulted in “even the simplest things that we take for granted in life are difficult – getting a job, renting a flat etc…has been a lot harder.” (No Knives, Better Lives, 2019).

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Northampton Students’ Union and Niger Delta Youth Accociation are proud to host  ‘Most Inspirational Male Role Model of the Year in Northamptonshire 2019’ Award Winner and guest of Channel 4’s  ‘Britain’s Young Drug Runners’ Anton Noble for an inspirational conversation.

Description: Exploring real life examples and case studies, this conversation explores the Causes and Risk Factors of Knife Crime, the impact on our local community and it’s members and educates attendees on prevention and intervention strategies.  Closing with a Call to Action from Niger Delta Youth Association and Guiding Young Minds, this workshop offers a comprehensive overview of knife crime and our involvement as a community.

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Victims, offenders and victim-offender overlaps of knife crime: A social network analysis approach using police records

Laura bailey.

1 Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Vincent Harinam

Barak ariel.

2 Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

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Data cannot be shared publicly because of data sharing restrictions imposed by the data owner - Thames Valley Police. The point of contact for the data is Thames Valley Police Data Protection Unit at https://www.thamesvalley.police.uk/rqo/request/ri .

Knife crime is a source of concern for the police in England and Wales, however little published research exists on this crime type. Who are the offenders who use knives to commit crime, when and why? Who are their victims, and is there a victim-offender overlap? What is the social network formation for people who are exposed to knife crime? Using a multidimensional approach, our aim is to answer these questions about one of England and Wales’ largest jurisdictions: Thames Valley. We first provide a state-of-the-art narrative review of the knife crime literature, followed by an analysis of population-level data on central tendency and dispersion of knife crimes reported to the police (2015–2019), on offences, offenders, victims, victim-offender overlaps and gang-related assaults. Social network analysis was used to explore the formations of offender-victim networks. Our findings show that knife crime represents a small proportion of crime (1.86%) and is associated largely with violence offenses. 16–34 year-old white males are at greatest risk of being the victims, offenders or victim-offenders of knife crime, with similar relative risks between these three categories. Both knife offenders and victims are likely to have a criminal record. Knife crimes are usually not gang-related (less than 20%), and experienced mostly between strangers, with the altercation often a non-retaliatory ‘one-off event’. Even gang-related knife crimes do not follow ‘tit-for-tat’ relationships—except when the individuals involved have extensive offending histories and then are likely to retaliate instantaneously. We conclude that while rare, an incident of knife crime remains predicable, as a substantial ratio of offenders and victims of future knife crime can be found in police records. Prevention strategies should not be focused on gang-related criminals, but on either prolific violent offenders or repeat victims who are known to the police—and therefore more susceptible to knife crime exposure.

1. Introduction

Reports of deaths arising from knife crimes have dominated United Kingdom (UK) headlines for the past half-decade, with U.S. President Donald Trump comparing the UK to a ‘military war zone’ [ 1 ]. British politicians have declared a ‘national emergency’, promising to ‘come down hard’ on the ‘scourge’ of knife crimes [ 2 , 3 ]. Yet, the literature on the topic is, interestingly, scant [ 4 ].

As Eades et al. [ 5 ] contended, in order to curb knife crime we must first understand what it is, who is involved and why certain individuals are attracted to it. Furthermore, while knife armament is seen as a relatively recent crime trend (it is not), the causes cited by those involved bear resemblance to the criminological literature on the victim-offender overlap (V-OO), where victims and offenders, based on shared characteristics and social space, are ‘one-in-the-same’ [ 6 , 7 ]. This suggests that V-OO may be a viable theoretical composition through which we can contextualise, forecast, and potentially prevent knife crime.

While V-OO provides an important assessment of individuals and their risk factors, our understanding of knife crimes can be aided by a more holistic view: explicating all the actors involved in knife crime, and only then reviewing their social ties. In this sense, social network analysis (SNA) provides an opportunity to look at the interdependencies between individuals involved in knife crime [ 8 ]. As noted by Lauritsen and Laub [ 9 ], it is not only an individual’s victimisation that needs to be considered, but also the victimisation within their social network, which can potentially be used to determine risk of both future victimisation and offending. For this, however, we must assume there is an organisational or structural component—i.e. gangs or organised crime—that causes knife-enabled violence to proliferate and spread through networks: violence begets violence, and proximity to violence places an individual at greater risk of victimisation [ 10 ]. This, however, has not been addressed in the violence literature.

By combining V-OO and SNA, this study provides insight into the nature of knife crime and how it spreads, if at all, among individuals and their criminal associations. In particular, SNA allows for the examination of the network structure of knife crimes in Thames Valley. This offers key strategic insight which may inform future law enforcement interventions. Importantly, this study also examines the role of retaliation and inter-gang violence in knife crime. We do this by examining population-level data of all non-domestic knife crimes recorded by the Thames Valley Police (TVP) between 2015 and early 2019.

2. Literature review

2.1 difficulties in quantifying knife crime in the uk.

Based on police records, knife crime occurred in less than 3.3% of all violent and weapon crime in 2019, which makes it a rare event [ 11 ]. Regardless of its statistical rarity, knife crimes are serious events where those involved may be seriously harmed. As such, further research into its occurrence and composition may yield insight into reducing harm. Longitudinally, the Office of National Statistics report that knife crime in the UK has risen by 7% between 2018 and 2019 [ 12 ]. However, the rate of growth is slowing when data are analysed for a more extensive period of time [ 13 ]. As it is often the case with low incidence events, longitudinal analyses can produce dramatic year-on-year fluctuations, though, in relative terms, the variations represent only small changes in incidence counts [ 14 , 15 ]. This may drive the dramatization in the media over the recent reported ‘spike’ in knife crime [ 16 – 19 ].

Another issue is whether police records are representative of ‘true population means’. First, modifications in crime recording practices could be driving these supposed increases in knife crime [ 12 , 20 ]. There are variations between police forces, between police units and over time [ 21 ], which makes both the validity as well as the reliability of ‘official statistics’ suspect at times [ 22 , 23 ]. Second, as observed by Ariel and Bland [ 24 ], police proactivity can be the main driver for reported increases in knife crime, especially when ‘knife crime’ includes possession offences, which are directly affected by targeted police activity such as stop and search [ 25 ]. Indeed, the combination of surge funding, associated stop and searches increases, and the explicit focus on weapons will affect the validity of police-recorded data. Moreover, this distinction between possession offences and violent crimes precipitated with a knife should be separated when we analyse data trends—both longitudinally and cross-sectionally.

2.1.1 Who is more likely to commit a weapon offence?

Just like the definition of what constitutes a knife crime, the antecedents for carrying or using a sharp blade are diverse. However, the literature on the perpetrators of knife crime is scant, with much of the knowledge arising from general studies of violence in which the data on weapon offences are often auxiliary to the main research questions. Still, the available evidence remains informative, and unravels several themes that cut across jurisdictions, contexts and time.

Research shows that young males are substantially more likely to be involved in knife crime [ 26 p7; 7]. The typical age range of those involved is between 13 and 24 years [ 27 ], which mimics the age-crime curve in terms of violence more broadly. If the study’s estimates are valid, then this translates to nearly 18,000 boys in this age group who carry a weapon [ 21 ]. The Serious Violence Strategy [ 21 ] further revealed that primarily underprivileged children, or those with four or more siblings, are more likely to be involved in serious violence, which illustrates the importance of studying familial links in violence.

Knife crime is more likely to take place in and around schools [ 28 ]. A recent ‘Freedom of Information request’ by the BBC News has indicated that out of 27 police forces in England and Wales that provided data, weapon possession (primarily sharp objects) at schools had doubled in four years. However, in absolute figures the rise consists of an increase from fewer than 500 per year to over 950 weapon possession offences in schools. Finally, one report suggests that carrying a weapon in school is associated with underachievement amongst 10 to18-year olds and more profoundly with school exclusions (but not due to weapon possessions) and a higher proportion had been persistently absent from school [ 29 ].

2.2 The victim-offender overlap and its pertinence to knife criminality

The victim-offender overlap (V-OO) is well established within criminological research [ 30 , 31 ]. The V-OO was first presented by Von Hentig [ 32 ] and later put forward by Wolfgang [ 33 ] and Gottfredson [ 8 ]. The authors identified a crossover between victims and offenders, determining three categories of criminally involved individuals: ‘pure victims’, ‘pure offenders’, and those who are ‘one-and-the-same’ (or victim-offenders). These ‘victim-offenders’ often share social characteristics, risk factors and etiological linkages which are different from pure victims and offenders [ 34 ].

Several theories have been proposed to explain the V-OO. These can be grouped into two schools of thought: the dynamic causal perspective and the population heterogeneity perspective [see review in 35 ]. First, the dynamic causal perspective purports that when the likelihood of being victimised increases, there is an immediate elevated risk of committing a violent offence [ 36 ]. In a longitudinal study of Swiss youth, Averdijk et al. [ 37 ] found that following victimisation, individuals are less likely to feel shame or remorse when committing a future offence—which tends to justify subsequent crime. On the other hand, the population heterogeneity perspective argues that victimisation and offending do not cause one another but are instead caused by stable personality characteristics or environmental factors that precipitate both [ 35 ]. The general theory of crime is an example of this view, stipulating that low self-control is the cause of criminality [ 38 ]. Whether this arises from an offender’s prior criminal history [ 39 ] or the history of their peers, the risk of victimisation is more pronounced [ 40 , 41 ]. For example, in a study of victims with low self-control who were subject to a serious assault, Singer [ 42 ] identified that these individuals had the highest probability of having a friend arrested, belonging to a gang, using a weapon and committing a serious assault. Thus, a third factor causes both the likelihood of offending as well as being a victim—but there is no necessarily reciprocal relationship between the two; the end result, however, is the same: a V-OO.

Gangs have received specific attention in the V-OO research. In 2009, Melde et al. [ 43 ] conducted a study of youths aged between 10 and 16 years, identifying that those in gangs report greater levels of actual and perceived risk of victimisation compared to non-gang-members. In a longitudinal study of Chicago youth, Zimmerman et al. [ 44 ] looked at the relationship between victims and offenders, finding that the odds of offending are 76% greater if victimised, and 70% greater if victimised by a gang member. Papachristos et al. [ 10 ] contend that gang membership is associated with a tripled risk of violent victimisation. Similarly, Zavala [ 45 ] found that gang membership increases the risk of victimisation by 447%, and offending risk by 249%. Given this body of evidence, the underlying assumption ought to be that V-OO is ubiquitous, and that knife crime is likely to follow suit, although to the best of our knowledge no published research has looked at this phenomenon specifically in the context of knife crime.

2.3 Social network analysis and violent crime

Criminal conduct is a social behaviour, with most offenders being embedded within networks of delinquent and criminal friends [ 46 ]. The examination of these social networks can also provide insight into crime patterns and structures [ 47 , 48 ]. In recognising the connectivity between individuals, SNA allows for the examination of the connective properties that link these individuals and influence their behaviour [ 49 ].

Haynie [ 50 ] illustrated that the more delinquent peers central to one’s network, the more delinquency will be measured at the level of the individual. The density of a network is also key, whereby a greater number of actors are said to increase the victimisation and offending risk [ 38 ]. In a study looking at juvenile co-offending networks, McGloin and Piquero [ 51 ] found that members of a ‘dense’ network are often specialised in their criminality when offending with others, while sparse networks demonstrated less criminal specialisation. Therefore, those who regularly offend together, such as gang members, will often commit similar offences due to the lack of skills and diversity afforded by group members.

Subsequently, the proliferation of violence is a key focus within SNA, often concluding that violence is infectious and passes through social networks [ 52 – 54 ]. By using dyadic analysis, Papachristos [ 55 ] identified that murders between rival gangs are best understood as social contagion, carried out within organised networks, rather than committed at random [ 56 ]. This is supported by the finding that 70% of victimisations occur within recognisable social networks; even indirect exposure to victimisation increases the likelihood of victimisation [ 10 ].

In relation to knife crime, similar findings were described as a ‘replicative externality’, whereby knife criminality proliferates though a person’s social network [ 57 ]. This highlights the importance of understanding an individual’s network and, in particular, their associations and connections, given the increased likelihood of offending being committed within that network.

Admittedly, most SNA studies on violent networks have been conducted in the US, with an underrepresented crime portfolio from UK gangs [ 58 ]. Therefore, whilst being able to draw conclusions on the potential validity of SNA to examine the proliferation of knife crime within the UK, these results might be limited in their generalisability as to whether knife crime mimics the contagion effect of U.S. gun and gang violence.

3. The present study

Given the literature review, this research aims to address two research questions:

• Who offends and who is victimised by knife crime, and is there evidence of V-OO?
• What is the network structure of knife crimes in Thames Valley, based on these police records?

4. Data and methods

To address the research questions, our study uses a population-level dataset, covering the full cohort of knife crimes and linked individuals across the geographical area serviced by the Thames Valley Police (TVP) of England and Wales. TVP is the largest non-metropolitan police force in England and Wales, with a jurisdiction over 2,200 m 2 , three primary counties (Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire), a diverse population of more than 2.34M residents and approximately 6M visitors who come to the Thames Valley each year. The Thames Valley is located in the southeast region of England, west of London. The police force area is divided into 12 Local Policing Areas, with more than 4,120 frontline officers, 3,400 police staff and more than 500 volunteers.

The dataset used originates from police-recorded information reported and retained in local police records referred to as the Records Management System that is used by the TVP (RMS Niche), which manages information in relation to people, locations, organisations and incidents. The dataset contains all non-domestic knife crime occurrences across the TVP Force Area (covering the entirety of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire) reported to or by the police within a four-year period (01/04/2015 to 31/03/2019). This four-year dataset was selected due to changes in knife crime recording practices prior to this period. Importantly, we define ‘knife crime’ as any event where a knife, sharp instrument or other bladed implement was present or used to assault another person.

For the period of interest, a total of 515,939 unique non-domestic crimes were reported (as an illustration, in 2019 199,772 crimes were recorded, of which 58,752 violent crimes and 1,627 robberies were registered. However, only 10,146 non-domestic knife crime offences were identified based on RMS Niche filters, which recorded the presence or use of a knife during the commission of an offence. Of these 10,146 knife crime offences, 10,099 unique cases can be identified (i.e. 47 duplicate entries were removed). This constitutes 2.2% of all offenses in Thames Valley over the period of study. These offences occurred against 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders who were identified. For the purposes of this study, “offender” is defined as an individual who initiates a knife crime while “victim” is defined as an individual who is on the receiving of the knife crime within that specific knife crime incident. These definitions are reflective of how victims and offenders were categorized within the dataset by Thames Valley crime analysts and database managers. With respect to the V-OO, it is important to clarify that an individual can be a victim in one knife crime event and an offender in another separate event.

In terms of data points, we gained access to anonymised information on all the individuals involved, including whether they are affiliated with gangs or organized crime groups (OCGs); their gender, ethnicity, date of birth, prior offences and victimisations; and all the quantifiable information on system. Importantly, 610 unique individuals were identified as both a knife crime victim and offender (V-OO), representing 8.8% of the victim population and 8.4% of the offender population.

4.2 Analysis plan

4.2.1 descriptive statistics.

Measures of central tendency and dispersion were used to summarize the 10,099 knife crimes. These basic descriptors are useful for understanding both the socio-demographic and spatial composition of knife crime, as well as the presence of a V-OO.

4.2.2 Social network analysis

We employed descriptive network analysis to illustrate how the social networks of knife crime offenders are constructed in Thames Valley. All network statistics and modelling were conducted in R using the igraph [ 59 ] and statnet [ 60 ] packages, while visualizations were conducted in Gephi. Social network analysis offers unique insight into the composition of a criminal network. Moreover, by examining the global structure of knife crimes, we can better diagnose the UK’s perceived knife crime epidemic and offer policy recommendations on how to deal with it. As such, social network analysis represents a novel means by which UK knife crimes can be examined.

From the 10,099 identified knife crime offences, two networks were created: 1) a one-mode ‘actor-to-actor’ network featuring offenders and victims and 2) a one-mode ‘actor-to-actor’ network featuring offending OCGs and victimised OCGs. Given the strict requirement of both an identifiable offender and victim, only knife crime offences with both a known offender and victim were used to construct these networks. Offenders and victims were identified based on their Unique Nominal ID and criminal association. As some offenders and victims could not be linked to a victim or offender, respectively, due to data limitations they were removed from analysis. As such, the offender-victim network consisted of 7,044 pairs, with 5,020 unique offenders and 4,550 unique victims. The OCG-to-OCG network consisted of 208 pairs, with 97 unique offending OCGs and 86 unique victimised OCGs. A link between the nodes was defined as co-offending or involving knife crime [ 61 ].

More formally, our analyses use directed ties, meaning that the tie from i to j is not necessarily reciprocated ( i may attack j with a knife, while j may not do the same to i ). An interaction between an offender and victim is regarded as a tie, y ij , where y ij = 1 if a violent interaction has occurred between offender i and victim j and y ij = 0 if not. As our data are weighted, y ij may be greater than 1 if offender i and victim j have had multiple interactions.

We applied four network measures to assess the structure of these networks: network density, average in/out-degree centrality, reciprocity and modularity. Density measures the overall interconnectedness of a network (e.g. the number of possible interactions between offender i and victim j ). To this extent, network density measures the total number i to j ties divided by the number of possible ties in the network. Represented by a coefficient ranging from 0 to 1, a high density (close to 1) indicates that offenders tend to engage in knife crimes frequently and with different victims. Conversely, a low density (close to 0) indicates that offenders tend to assault a single victim on an infrequent basis.

Average in/out-degree centrality measures the average number of unique ties an actor has within their respective network. For our purposes, it indicates the average number of unique victims an offender has (outdegree centrality) and the average number of unique offenders a victim has (indegree centrality). Reciprocity delineates the proportion of mutual connections in a directed graph [ 62 ]. It is commonly defined as the probability that the opposite counterpart of a directed edge is also included in the graph. That is, the proportion of i to j ties divided by the total number of ties in the network. Reciprocity indicates the extent to which offenders are victimised by their previous victims.

Finally, modularity indicates the extent to which a network decomposes into modular communities [ 63 ]. In the network sciences, a community is comprised of nodes that are more densely connected to each other than to other nodes in the network. For our purposes, modularity reflects the number of knife crime communities within the network. To this extent, the number and connectivity of isolated knife crime communities serves as an indicator of the level of ‘information flow’, and by extension, fragmentation, within the network. Modularity is a chance-corrected statistic ranging from -0.5 to 1. It is defined as the fraction of ties that fall within the given groups minus the expected fraction if ties were distributed at random. A high modularity score (Q) suggests that the network is compartmentalized into distinct subgroups [for further technical details see 64 ].

4.3 Data limitations

Perhaps the foremost limitation of any police data system is the poor validity of the information recorded therein [ 65 ]. Fluctuations in criminality due to police proactivity and the quality of reporting are an open concern [ 24 ]. Therefore, this study only presents data on what TVP know, which likely masks the true population figures: official statistics are unlikely to represent the true scale of knife criminality across Thames Valley.

In terms of data quality, we lack any information on how knives are used. Without knowing this, it is difficult to measure the true harm arising from knife crimes, without manually reviewing all 10,099 knife crime offences—an exercise that was beyond the scope of this inquiry.

Finally, while knife crimes may be underreported, known knife crime offenders may be over-reported. As law enforcement often suspect those already known to them of committing a crime [ 54 ], the number of times that an offender is linked to multiple knife crimes may be inflated.

5.1 Descriptive statistics for knife crime trends, offenders, and victims

5.1.1 knife crimes by year and crime sub-classification.

During the four years under review, the proportion of all non-domestic crime represented by knife crime increased by an average of 1.86%, while the rate of all non-domestic crime increased by an average of 6.52% each year. However, despite the increasing volume of knife crime each year (2015/2016: 1,816; 2016/2017: 2,244; 2017/2018: 2,867; 2018/2019: 3,172), the rate of growth has been inconsistent, with a 27.8% increase from 2016–2017 to 2017–2018 and 10.6% increase in 2018–2019 from the previous year. Importantly, when the data are disaggregated based on offence sub-classifications, we find that violence and weapons possession offences drive year-to-year knife crime increases (see Fig 1 ).

Of the 10,099 knife crime offences, 1,636 offences are linked to police-recognised organized crime groups (OCGs), which represents 16.2% of all knife crimes within the four-year period. To this extent, 236 offences involved both an OCG-affiliated offender and victim, while 1,380 and 492 offences involved only an OCG-affiliated offender and victim, respectively. Notably, of these 1,636 OCG-related knife crimes, 294 were linked to drug activity distributed between county drug lines and by local drug dealers.

5.1.2 Socio-demographic characteristics of knife crimes

Within the 10,099 knife crime offences, there are 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders. The key demographics are presented in Table 1 . In general, we can see that White (Northern European) males between the ages of 16 and 34 constitute the majority of knife crime victims within Thames Valley. This is also the case for offenders, who are 87.6% male, 59.6% White (Northern European), and 59.3% aged 16 to 34.

Of the 6,896 unique victims and 7,231 unique offenders, 548 (7.8%) and 1,380 (19%) had a link to a recognized OCG, respectively. Furthermore, 38% (130) of OCG-affiliated victims were members of a drug dealing gang, with 87 and 52 of these victims linked to ‘county lines’ (County Line is a term used to describe gangs and organised criminal networks involved in exporting illegal drugs into one or more importing areas within the UK, using dedicated mobile phone lines or other form of “deal line”) and local drug dealers, respectively. Similarly, 34% (469) of OCG-affiliated offenders were linked to a drug gang while 28% (386) were affiliated with a weapons/firearms gang. Notably, 291 victims experienced more than one knife victimisation, accounting for 633 total knife crime offences. Furthermore, the majority of these victims were male (81.6%), White (Northern European) (52.5%), and aged 16 to 34 (55.4%).

5.1.3 Habitual knife crime offenders and repeat victims of knife crime

Those identified as repeat victims and offenders both experienced, on average, two knife crime incidents. Of the 7,231 unique offenders, 1,564 (21.6%) committed more than one knife crime offence, accounting for 41.4% of all knife crimes within the four years of study. However, this distribution reaches a maximum of five incidents for victims and 13 for offenders. Importantly, incidents experienced by repeat victims (4.2%) represented a small percentage of all knife crimes (6.27%), while 21.6% of repeat offenders committed 41.4% of knife criminality.

Similar to repeat knife crime victims, repeat offenders were primarily male (92.5%), between the ages of 16 and 24 (42.4%), and predominantly White (Northern European) (57.3%), with Blacks and Asians accounting for 25.2% and 11.5%, respectively. To place these statistics in perspective, 8% Oxfordshire’s population are Black, Asian or other ethnic minorities ( http://www.southoxon.gov.uk ).

The data present evidence of a V-OO: 610 individuals can be identified as both a victim and an offender. This cohort accounted for 7.3% (734) of all knife crimes, with 410 offences committed by 145 repeat victim-offenders. Only nine knife crime incidents involved a victim and offender who were both repeat victim-offenders. In terms of gender distribution, 89% were male, comparable to all knife crime offenders within the dataset. White (North European) overrepresented, constituting 65.5% of victim-offenders, followed by Black (18.8%) and Asian (14.24%) victim-offenders. Moreover, the average age for male victim-offenders is 27 years and 29 for females (63.1% (385) are between the ages of 16 and 34).

In terms of repeat involvement in knife crime, victim-offenders are split into two groups: victimised and offending. Eleven per cent of victim-offenders experienced 22.9% of victim knife crime (1.9% of total knife crime), while 23.7% of victim-offenders committed 55.8% of victim-offender associated knife crime (4% of total knife crime). Of the 610 victim-offenders, 30.5% (186) were affiliated with an OCG. Of the 10,099 unique knife crimes, only 236 offences involved victim-offenders with a known affiliation to OCGs and gangs (2.34%). Groups of offenders that deal drugs represent more than 33% of all OCGs and gangs. Within this group of victims-offenders, 47% are linked to country lines, 32.9% linked to local drug dealers, and the rest (20%) to both. Of the 610 unique victim-offenders, they experienced 679 knife-crime offences (6.7% of all knife crime). 156 offences were experienced by 72 repeat victim-offenders. Of the 610 unique victim-offenders, they committed 734 knife-crime offences (7.2% of all knife crime). 410 offences were committed by 145 repeat victim-offenders. Although this represents 4% of all knife crime, this equates to 55.8% of all knife-crime being committed by 23.7% of all victim-offenders.

5.2 The network structure of Thames Valley knife crimes

5.2.1 offender-victim networks.

The offender-victim knife crime network is comprised of 9,261 unique actors spread across 7,044 knife crime incidents, with 5,020 and 4,550 unique offenders and victims, respectively. Moreover, only 22% (1,107) of offenders and 10% (442) of victims were affiliated with an OCG. As such, the network is comprised primarily of non-OCG-affiliated actors. As expected, there are no isolates within the network, as an actor cannot be both an offender and victim within the same dyadic pairing.

As shown in Table 2 , the average indegree and outdegree centrality are proxies for the average number of offenders who have assaulted a victim and the average number of victims harmed by an offender. As such, knife crime victims have been accosted by 1.52 offenders, on average, whereas knife crime offenders have harmed an average of 1.37 victims. Importantly, we observed small but statistically significant differences in the outdegree and indegree centrality among OCG-affiliated and non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims.

Independent samples t-tests revealed that OCG-affiliated offenders and victims possessed a higher average number of victims (1.62) and offenders (1.76) relative to their non-OCG-affiliated counterparts [( t (1370) = 8.94, p = <0.0001), and ( t (575) = 4.2, p = <0.0001) respectively]. This reveals a key distinction between the frequency and intensity of knife crime offences: while non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims may account for a larger proportion of knife crimes, OCG-affiliated offenders and victims are involved in a higher average number of knife crimes.

The distribution of outdegree and indegree centrality reveals that 78.1% and 72.9% of all offenders and victims had only one victim and offender, respectively (see Table 3 ). Furthermore, 66.6% and 60% of OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender while 81.3% and 74.3% of non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender. This suggests that the overwhelming majority of knife crimes are one-off events between two individuals.

Like many other criminal networks, the offender-victim knife crime network is markedly diffused, with a network density of 0 (note: the network density was rounded to 0). For the sake of comparison, the density of a dark web opioid distribution market studied by Duxbury and Haynie [ 66 ] was 0.002, while Jihadi networks examined by Krebs [ 67 ] and Morselli, Giguere, and Petit [ 68 ] ranged from 0.2 to 0.4. Furthermore, this network possessed a modularity of 0.997, with 2,923 identifiable communities. This suggests a high level of network fragmentation as nodes within the network exhibited clustering with respect to their given node grouping (see Fig 2 ).

In general, the structure of the offender-victim knife crime network is dyadic, as components with two nodes accounted for a majority (65.3%) of all components and a plurality (41.2%) of all nodes within the network. Furthermore, triads accounted for the second largest component group, representing 17.5% and 16.6% of all components and nodes, respectively. Indeed, knife crimes in Thames Valley are dyadic: one-off crime events between two individuals. This, moreover, explains the marked fragmentation as this network is comprised of many two-node subgroups while lacking many large multi-node components ( Fig 2 ).

However, the fragmentation and dyadic composition of the offender-victim knife crime network may be a by-product of the relationship between the individuals involved. Our data show that 34.7% (2,444) and 33.1% (2,330) of knife crime incidents in this network involved strangers and acquaintances, respectively. While many law enforcement databases struggle from missing data, this particularly database was mainly complete with 97% of knife crime incidents possessing the relationship between the victim and offender. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that as stranger violence is more likely to be reported, this finding may nevertheless be subject to a recording bias. Equally important are the criminal and victimisation histories of these offenders and victims (see Table 4 ). While a plurality (25.8%) of offenders had no prior criminal offending, a majority (52.9%) of these offenders had no prior victimisations. Similarly, 60.2% and 51.1% of victims had no prior offending or victimisations. However, knife crime offenders are more likely to have a criminal record, with 74.2% having committed at least one prior offence.

5.2.2 OCG-to-OCG network

The OCG-to-OCG knife crime network is comprised of 141 unique OCGs, including 97 unique offending OCGs and 86 unique victimised OCGs (see Table 5 and Fig 3 for more details). These are spread across 209 knife crime incidents. 17.8% of all incidents involved an offender and victim from the same OCG, so we see that that in the majority of cases of when OCG members use knives as an assault weapon, they are directed at rival OCGs.

As per the average indegree centrality ( Table 5 ), victimised OCGs are harmed by 1.85 OCGs, on average, whereas offending OCGs commit harm against 1.64 OCGs, on average. In short, it does not appear that inter-OCG knife crimes occur at a high frequency among a bevy of OCGs. This is corroborated by the distribution of outdegree and indegree centrality measures, where 62.9% of offending OCGs harmed only one OCG, while 60.5% of victimised OCGs were harmed by a single OCG. Only 22.7% and 22.1% of offending and victimised OCGs harmed or were harmed by two OCGs, respectively. In addition to a low reciprocity of 0.02, it appears that OCG-related knife crimes, like those committed by persons, are one-off events that rarely beget retaliation. To this point, only 2.9% (6) of all cases were tied to retaliation, and this network is not dyadic, as 73% (103) of all nodes are housed within a single component.

5.2.3 Retaliations within the offender-victim network

Of the 7,044-recorded knife crime incidences in this network, 0.94% (66) were retaliations where actor j harmed actor i following actor i ’s initial attack on actor j . As such, we found 33 retaliatory incidents, representing 33 mutual dyads in the network. This small number of retaliations is ultimately reflected in the low reciprocity of 0.009. This finding supports the established trend regarding the one-off nature of Thames Valley knife crimes.

Based on this small sample, we were able to determine that retaliations occurred within 16.5 days (or 395.15 hours) after the initial knife crime. However, this number should be cautiously considered as 12 of the 33 retaliatory attacks were instantaneous, occurring immediately (within a minute of the initial assault) following the initial attack. Importantly, only 12% of offenders and victims were affiliated with an OCG. As such, knife crime retaliations are not primarily a gang-related phenomenon. Of the 33 recorded retaliations, only three involved both an OCG-affiliated offender and victim. However, offenders who engaged in the initial and retaliatory knife crime were more likely to have an extensive criminal history relative to the rest of the offenders within the network. That is, 38% and 29% of the initial and retaliatory offenders had committed nine or more prior offences, respectively.

6. Discussion

6.1 knife crime is male-dominated, with young adults between 16–34 and a criminal background—but not gang-related. the same can be said about victims of knife crime.

Our data provide information on the nature and structural composition of knife crimes in the TVP Force Area. If our results are generalizable, then UK knife crime networks typically involve strangers, both of whom have a criminal history or prior victimisation, but are not gang affiliated, as over 81% of offenders and 92.2% of victims were found to be unaffiliated with any organised crime groups. We contextualise these findings more broadly within two distinct layers: individuals and networks.

The characteristics of victims and offenders bear marked similarities. That is, the age range, gender and ethnicities of these two groups are more similar than they are different, with males between the ages of 16 and 34 constituting the majority of victims and offenders. In terms of ethnicity, we found little difference between victims and offenders, with White (Northern Europeans) representing 72% and 66% respectively. Asian and Black ethnicities, however, are over-represented in the data, compared to their overall population trends in the TVP area. In general, the demographic similarities between victims and offenders provide some support for the existence of a victim-offender overlap in knife crimes [ 9 ], although with some variation in frequency and scope.

While a plurality (25.8%) of offenders had no prior criminal offending, a majority (52.9%) of these offenders have no prior victimisations. Similarly, 60.2% and 51.1% of victims had no prior offending or victimisations. The preponderance of first-time victims points to the peculiar nature of knife crimes in Thames Valley as most victims are generally not involved in crime of any sort. However, the offender-victim network indicated that the majority of offenders were known to the police from prior offences (74.2%). Nearly half of those victimised were repeat victims (47.1%). If these police records represent true population means of knife crime offenders and victims, then knife crime is correlated with criminal behaviour more broadly. This deviates from common assaults and less severe forms of violence, which is more likely to be a result of contextual factors (e.g. alcohol) rather than a crime committed by a seasoned offender. Knife crime is different: those who carry knives, and those who use them to commit crimes (and get caught), are known offenders. Even the victims are usually known to the police, with 39.8% having a criminal record, and 38.9% having been injured in the past. These trends are not very different from those reported in earlier studies [ 5 , 31 , 33 ].

Finally, the literature points to gang involvement as one of the main correlates of violent crime. However, the TVP data suggest otherwise, with under 19% of offenders and 7.8% of victims marked by an association with a recognized gang or organized crime. These figures support Massey et al. [ 69 ] who found that only 21% of knife homicides in London were gang related. More broadly, these findings debunk much of what is portrayed in the media: drug gangs escalating the risk of knife crime by using violence to exploit and obtain territory [ 70 ]. Indeed, it appears that TVP knife crimes are not usually gang related, and in fact experienced mostly by young and non-criminals.

6.2 Social networks of knife crime are usually dyadic and non-reiterative

The construction of both an offender-victim and OCG-to-OCG network offers unique insight into the structural composition of Thames Valley knife crimes on both an individual and organizational level. The offender-victim network was constructed from 7,044 of the 10,099 knife crimes, representing 69.7% of all incidents, including 5,020 (69.4%) unique offenders and 4,550 (65.9%) unique victims. Despite their involvement in the majority of knife incidents, non-OCG affiliated offenders and victims have fewer unique victims and offenders than their OCG-affiliated counterparts. This small but statistically significant difference reveals a key distinction in terms of the frequency and intensity of knife crimes: while non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims account for a greater proportion of police-recorded knife criminality, OCG-affiliated victims and offenders are more frequently involved in these offences.

Moreover, 78% of all offenders and 73% of all victims had only one victim and offender, but when broken down into OCG and non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims, 67% and 60% of OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender, while 81.3% and 74.3% of non-OCG-affiliated offenders and victims had a single victim and offender. This indicates that an overwhelming majority of knife crimes are one-off events between two individuals. This is also reflected in the distribution of component sizes. Indeed, the victim-offender network is predominantly dyadic, where 65.3% of all components, comprising 41.2% of all nodes, are dyads. There is a distinct absence of many large multi-node components.

These findings seemingly run contrary to much of the co-offending network literature in the United States, which often reports that violent crime across high-crime communities occurs within small, identifiable networks of individuals actively engaged in criminal and delinquent behaviour [ 10 , 53 , 71 ]. Papachristos et al. [ 72 ] found in a high-crime neighbourhood in Boston that 85% of all gunshot injuries occurred within a single network containing only 763 individuals, two-thirds of whom were either gang members or had been arrested in the months leading up to their victimisation. These differences may be explained by cultural distinctions between gangs across the Atlantic, but they can also be the product of structural differences in geographic locales [ 73 ]. Studies by Papachristos et al. [ 10 , 74 ] presented results from densely populated U.S. cities with well-established gang and gun violence. The knife crime study presents data arising from three UK diverse counties, which provide heterogeneity in landscape (rural and urban), culture and crime trends. As such, findings from studies of criminal networks in the U.S. [ 75 , 76 ] cannot be duplicated for criminal networks in the UK; additional research is required to expound these disparities.

However, an equally likely explanation for this discrepancy may lie in the nature of the co-offending network examined. In general, U.S.-based studies deal predominantly with broader co-offending networks that are larger and subject to greater network density. For example, studies by Papachristo et. al [ 10 , 55 ] and Papachristos and Wildeman [ 71 ] which examined gun violence networks in the U.S. included all arrest and co-arrests. Being more broadly defined, these networks are much larger, with more connections between victims and offenders relative to the network examined in this study. Furthermore, as this network is defined only by victims and offenders involved in knife crimes, it is unlikely to have a network density like in the aforementioned studies.

It is, however, arguable that the idiosyncrasies of the Thames Valley knife crime network are a consequence of the attributes of the individuals involved. To this extent, 34.7% and 33.1% of all knife crime incidents involved strangers and acquaintances, respectively. As the offenders and victims are strangers and acquaintances who have rarely or never associated with one another, it is unlikely that they will meet again following their altercation.

6.3 Tit-for-tat is uncommon

Finally, we find little evidence for retaliatory knife crime. We assumed that retaliatory assaults are common. Yet the SNA indicated otherwise: given the dyadic relationships in terms of knife crime that takes place primarily between unfamiliar strangers, the likelihood of a repeated transgression between the same parties is low: only 33 retaliatory incidents were identified. The overwhelming majority of knife crimes (99.61%) begin and end with the initial knife crime event. This finding can be explained by the criminal involvement of the offenders and the victims: the majority of them are not gang-affiliates, who are more likely to retaliate.

The literature is mixed on this issue of retaliation. Some find support for tit-for-tat [ 77 – 79 ], while others do not, finding no evidence of retaliation when the incident was perpetrated by a stranger or someone the victim barely knew [ 10 ]. Our findings support the latter perspective, given the rarity of this recording. The number of incidents is too low for valid forecasts, at least in the context of the Thames Valley. Nevertheless, offenders who participated in retaliatory knife incidents were more likely to have an extensive criminal history relative to the rest of the offenders within the network. That is, 38% and 29% of the initial and retaliatory offenders had committed nine or more prior offences, respectively. This, in part, suggests that retaliatory knife crimes are between actors with extensive criminal histories. This finding provides an important opportunity for proactive policing, whereby preventative tactics can be employed to deter high-risk retaliators from committing an offence following knife crime victimisation [ 80 ].

6.4 OCGs and gangs play a limited role in knife crime

The OCG-to-OCG network is comprised of 208 knife crime incidents, 82.2% of which involved different groups. Moreover, victimised OCGs were harmed by 1.85 OCGs while offending OCGs harmed 1.64 rivals. The majority of OCGS—62.9% and 60.5% of offending and victimised OCGS—harmed and were harmed by only one OCG, respectively. In addition to a low reciprocity of 0.02, it appears that OCG-related knife crimes, like those in the offender-victim network, remain one-off events that rarely beget retaliation. These findings contradict popular claims of OCGs driving UK knife crimes.

However, unlike the offender-victim network, the OCG-to-OCG network is not dyadic, with 73% of all nodes being housed within a single component. This is particularly telling as it indicates that OCG-related knife crimes are not densely reciprocated incidents between a small contingent of rival OCGs, but crime events that sparsely tie together an assortment of OCGs. Taken together, these results indicate that knife crimes perpetrated by TVP OCGs are not only rare, but also generally unreflective of the violent turf wars that characterise North American OCG and gang activities [ 77 , 81 ].

6.5 Policy implications: Pre-emptive prevention measures with known offenders

From a practical perspective, dramatically limiting the number of potential offenders and victims—or both—from the overall population of people who live or visit a jurisdiction creates a finite pool of individuals for law enforcement agencies to control. Indeed, the relative contribution of each offender to overall knife crime is not shaped in a ‘power few’ formation [ 82 ], with a relatively small number of individuals responsible for a disproportionate number of incidents [ 83 ]. Still, some clustering does take place. Our analyses suggest that about one-fifth of repeat offenders committed about 42% of all the knife crime [ 84 ]. Nevertheless, they are known to the police (by virtue of being repeatedly arrested), and there are still some violent offenders who engage more regularly in crime than others. These data distributions present targeting opportunities—for example through focused deterrence approaches [ 85 , 86 ].

The most immediate policy implication, however, concerns data and recording practices. As discussed by Massey et al. [ 69 ], we have also experienced data issues that hinder both forecasting as well as prevention of knife crime: the forced localisation of the data to the spatial boundaries of individual police forces; the ‘free text’ nature of many data points (for instance, the very recording of a knife); or the accuracy of data—all equally remain a source of concern in this line of research. Crime recording systems that do not allow for reasonable retrieval of historic data pose challenges. Equally, the feedback of data on the whereabouts of suspects, persons of interest and potential victims of knife crime (or violence more broadly) to field officers is sporadic and limited. Thus, more valid, reliable and available data can assist in understanding the phenomenon, as well as guide us toward effective preventative or suppressive initiatives.

As it relates to policy and law enforcement intervention, there is a need to separate gangs from knife crimes in order to tackle both problems more effectively. Whilst most policing approaches deal with the problem of gangs and knives as one-in-the-same, these findings suggest their independence from one another. Moreover, given the low density of the knife crime network, it is evident that knife crimes are one-on-one events. As the network is fragmented, it may be difficult for law enforcement to craft a targeting strategy which focuses on key actors within the network. However, this insight may prove useful as law enforcement should pivot away from interventions which target gangs to a generalized approach which discourages carrying knives in public. With that said, in order to identify those at greatest risk of high-harm knife crimes, police data recording systems must reduce duplicated entries and include options to record how a knife was used. With these improvements, a more valid assessment of knife crime harm could be conducted.

6.6 Future research implications

Overall, the characteristics of habitual knife crime offenders or repeat knife crime victims are not different from ‘one-off’ knife offenders and victims. We sense that our data are limited and therefore we are unable to trace discrete features of these subgroups. With additional information, classification of violent offenders is more likely. For example, we know that differences between offenders are often explained by situational, psychosocial or ecological factors—however these data points were beyond our reach. Future research should consider richer data and more fit actuarial models to forecast involvement of repeated knife crime. Such analysis may debunk one possible explanation for the habitualness we find in our data: a disproportionate attention on ‘likely suspects’ on the part of law enforcement [ 51 ]. While it may not be possible to use the current data to accurately forecast likely offenders, future research should consider how network-level data can be applied for the purposes of identifying knife crime risk. Such risk factors can be further developed to form the foundation of an actuarial forecasting tool for knife crimes. To this extent, this study has demonstrated the utility of social network analysis in determining the underlying structure of a knife crime network. Future research should consider utilizing social network analysis in order to replicate the findings of this study (e.g. network density, modularity, etc.).

Funding Statement

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

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Corinna Woodhull “thought she could save him,” her mother said after the sentencing

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A Minnesota man with a history of domestic violence has admitted to repeatedly stabbing his wife at their Tuesday night Bible study while there was an active warrant for his arrest.

Robert Castillo, 41, was sentenced to 33 ⅓ years behind bars on Friday, Sept. 13, after pleading guilty as charged to the second-degree murder of his wife, Corinna Woodhull, in 2023, according to plea and sentencing records obtained by PEOPLE.

The couple had been seated on Castillo’s sister’s couch holding hands and “acting normally,” that Tuesday, March 21, 2023, night according to the statement of probable cause by investigators who interviewed the Bible study participants. 

Castillo kissed her and whispered into his wife’s ear – although no witnesses heard what he said, per charging documents obtained by PEOPLE. 

After Woodhull shook her head to what her husband had said, Castillo pulled out a six-inch hunting knife, which he typically carried, and stabbed her an estimated 20 times.

Castillo’s sister grabbed Castillo by the hair, and multiple family members tackled him, pulling him off his wife, holding him down and disarming him.

“Don’t let me die,” Woodhull told one Bible study participant, according to the statement of probable cause.

When officers arrived at the St. Paul, Minn., residence, they found Woodhull “lying on the floor bleeding from injuries to her torso, chest, and arms,” while several people held Castillo to the floor, per the probable cause statement. His bloodied hunting knife was on the armrest of the couch. 

“Is she going to be okay?” Castillo asked an officer on his way to jail.

Woodhull was pronounced dead at the hospital at 9:39 p.m., per her autopsy, which was cited in the charging documents and notes that she died of multiple sharp force injuries.

Castillo’s sister told officers that Castillo had previously beaten the mother of his child with a hammer in her home, cracking her head open and breaking her arm, per the probable cause statement. She told authorities that the “incident with the hammer was a long time ago and she thought Castillo was getting better.”

At the time of his wife’s stabbing, the Department of Corrections had a warrant out for his arrest, as well as a warrant for failing to appear at a pretrial assault hearing, where he was accused of inflicting bodily harm on a prison guard while in prison for a previous conviction, according to charging documents.

Ramsey County Sheriffs Office

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Castillo had eight prior felony convictions for multiple assaults and possession of firearms, among other convictions, per the statement of probable cause, which notes that he had been convicted in a case in which he “repeatedly stabbed a sometime roommate's back, head, and neck with a knife,” and had also “beat the purported mother of his child with a hammer, breaking her left ulna.”

Castillo’s brother told officers that Castillo and Woodhull had broken up due to marital problems, per the charging documents. 

In interviews with police right after the stabbing, Castillo said, per the statement of probable cause, that he did not want to talk about the stabbing or the reason for the couple’s separation, which he said had occurred about a month earlier.

Following his sentencing, Woodhull’s mother, Linda Castle, described her daughter as a woman who wanted to help others, per WKRC . Her family said she ignored their concerns over Castillo’s violent criminal history.

“She thought she could save him,” Castle said, per the outlet. “That her love would help them live a life together.”

After her daughter’s murder, divorce papers were recovered from Woodhull’s car, which Castle believes was the motive behind her daughter’s slaying, per WKRC.

“She knew it was time to walk away, and that’s why she’s dead,” her mother said.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org . All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

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Florida’s ‘malibu rapist’ gets 3 years in prison for 1988 cold case, george girtman sentenced to over three years for sexual battery.

Anthony Talcott , Digital Journalist

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – Florida’s “ Malibu Rapist ” took a plea deal on Wednesday after he was found guilty of charges stemming from a 1988 cold case, according to the State Attorney’s Office.

The Malibu Rapist — whose real name is George Girtman — got his nickname after a string of sexual batteries in the 1980s and 1990s in the Malibu Homes subdivision in Orlando.

While he is already serving two life sentences for previous convictions, Girtman’s plea deal on Wednesday stemmed from a case in 1988 where he sexually battered a woman — identified as Gail Gardner — in her home, prosecutors announced.

While Gardner had pushed for decades to have Girtman held accountable for the crime, it wasn’t until 2021 that the Orlando Police Department tested DNA collected during her investigation, a release from the SAO states.

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As a result, Gardner’s rape kit — along with other cold case rape kits and DNA evidence — linked Girtman to the assaults.

According to investigators, the breakthrough allowed for charges to be filed on behalf of Girtman’s seven victims, with Wednesday’s plea deal being related to Gardner’s attack.

“The bravery and fearlessness of all the survivors, and in particular Ms. Gardner, have brought us to this day. Ms. Gardner stood up for herself and for all survivors of sexual assault,” Orange-Osceola State Attorney Andrew Bain said. “Today’s resolution is a reminder that justice, though sometimes delayed, is never out of reach. Our office is committed to continuing to stand up for victims, ensuring their voices are heard and to never stop fighting for justice.”

Girtman was sentenced to over three years in prison with credit for time served, the release says.

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Anthony, a graduate of the University of Florida, joined ClickOrlando.com in April 2022.

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America tested 100,000 forgotten rape kits. But justice remains elusive.

With untested rape kits piling up across the country, the department of justice wanted action – and convictions. years later, a usa today investigation finds, many of the same problems remain..

On summer nights a year apart, two women left bars in downtown Austin, Texas. Before they could get home safely, both were raped. 

One knew her rapist. He was an acquaintance, she said, who saw she was intoxicated and offered her a ride on the handlebars of his bicycle before sexually assaulting her as she drifted in and out of consciousness. 

The other did not. She told police she was attacked by strangers who pinned down her arms and legs while one of them raped her.  

Neither investigation led to an arrest.  

Years later in 2021, Austin police received a significant new lead: DNA found on one woman’s jeans matched DNA from a swab of the other’s neck. It suggested that the two women had been attacked by the same man – a serial rapist.

This is the kind of breakthrough officials across the country hoped for when they pledged to test sexual assault evidence that had been neglected for years in law enforcement storage rooms. Since 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice has given out nearly $350 million in grants to 90 local and state agencies through the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Officials promised the money would put rapists behind bars and give victims long-awaited answers. 

Instead, a USA TODAY investigation found, cases hit the same roadblocks they did when victims first came forward: kits left untested , haphazard or cursory reviews by police and prosecutors, and a reluctance to inform people about what happened to evidence collected from their own bodies. By the Justice Department's count, the program has led to 100,000 kits being tested and 1,500 convictions so far – nearly half from two agencies, while others have seen meager results.  

In Charlotte, North Carolina, a backlog of about 2,300 kits has netted 14 convictions. 

In Mobile, Alabama, a backlog of about 1,100 kits has led to convictions of eight men.  

In Austin, officials faced a backlog of more than 4,400 kits. They have secured just one conviction.

After the two Austin cases matched through DNA, a detective reviewed the files. Police said they contacted the woman who had reported being raped by a stranger, but she did not want to speak with them, and her investigation was again closed. Officials did not tell her that the man linked to her kit could be a serial rapist. 

On the other case, police botched their new review and did nothing. 

Krystal Allison, the woman who made that report, did not learn that the acquaintance she accused of rape had been linked to another reported sexual assault until USA TODAY contacted her this summer. 

“That seriously sent chills down my spine,” Allison said, her voice shaky. “Nobody has reached out to me at all. I know nothing of it.”  

America’s untested rape kits piled up across the country over the course of decades. 

Boxes about the size of a hardcover book each held evidence of a reported sexual assault – dried swabs of saliva and semen and blood, strands of hair, debris scraped from under fingernails. Each was collected from a person, most of them women and girls, during an hourslong exam. And each was shelved without being processed for DNA. The evidence crowded storerooms, tangible proof of law enforcement’s failure to support victims and hold rapists accountable. 

Testing the kits was supposed to be the first step in righting that wrong. In some places that received federal grants, not even that happened.  

A least a dozen grant recipients carved out exceptions to testing, leaving kits unprocessed for a second time. In one California county, officials boasted they had cleared their backlog, but only after deeming more than half of their kits ineligible for testing. 

In many cases, officials have done little beyond sending the kits to a lab, reviewing the results and again closing the files. In Maryland, according to a state report, some law enforcement agencies have shown “significant reluctance” to reopen investigations and have even stated outright that they are disregarding DNA matches. 

What’s more, some officials all but abandoned the idea of providing victims answers about what happened to their rape kits or apologies for how long testing took. One Kansas police agency has tried to reach just 17 victims from roughly 1,100 sexual assault kits. An official there said there are instances where DNA testing has identified the names of suspects for the first time but the victims have not been told, because officials don’t think their cases can be prosecuted. 

Noël Busch-Armendariz, a University of Texas at Austin professor and researcher who has interviewed women with backlogged kits, said it is disheartening that victims – yet again – have been overlooked. 

“Survivors of sexual assault mostly feel betrayed by the silence around what happened to them,” she said. 

Tell us your story: If you know of a rape case that was neglected, or have experience with the system, tell us here.

Officials from the Department of Justice who oversee the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative declined to be interviewed. 

In a written statement, spokeswoman Katherine Brown said the program has been instrumental in helping agencies across the country process untested kits, although she also noted that local laws and regulations can influence what happens next. Angela Williamson, who has led the federal program since its inception, acknowledged in a separate statement that local success will vary based on the level of commitment. 

But Williamson said the program has contributed to a “critical cultural shift” around the importance of testing sexual assault evidence. In addition to seeking justice in backlogged cases, the initiative aims to overhaul how the criminal justice system responds to sexual assault. Grantees have also used their funding to improve DNA collection and its use, train police and prosecutors and modernize how survivors and their families are treated. 

Williamson said it is too early to gauge the program’s success by the number of rapists who have been convicted because it can take years for cases to move from testing to potential conviction. Agency officials said DNA matches also can pop up long after a kit is tested as more profiles are uploaded to the federal database of DNA samples. 

Williamson made a similar argument – that it’s too soon to judge the results – when The Atlantic highlighted the program’s paltry outcomes five years ago. 

Yet the program's data tracking is so poor that in some places, the federal government has no idea how many rapists were convicted – and likely never will.

Federal performance data is riddled with errors, misleading figures and blank fields, and officials were overcounting convictions on their website by 20% until after USA TODAY pointed out a discrepancy. At least 10 grant sites told USA TODAY they have not been reliably tracking key metrics such as the number of victims contacted or convictions won. A 2022 audit by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found grant staff at the Department of Justice failed to identify “ problematic and struggling grantees ” and that three of five sites reviewed couldn’t provide documents confirming the numbers they reported to the government. 

Given the shortcomings of the federal data, USA TODAY contacted grant sites that received funding from fiscal year 2015 to 2022 to confirm key numbers, such as kits sent for testing, cases charged and victims contacted. Reporters then focused on 14 with the most complete data that were funded in the program’s early years, giving them the most time to test, investigate and prosecute.  

Two sites – prosecutors’ offices in Cleveland and Detroit – stood out, with more than 600 convictions combined. The remaining 12 reported 123 convictions, fewer than one for every 175 kits sent for testing. If they had been as successful as Cleveland at investigating and prosecuting cases, USA TODAY estimated they together would have secured at least 1,450 more convictions.  

Nearly a decade ago, the USA TODAY Network conducted what was then the most detailed nationwide inventory of untested rape kits . Reporters tallied at least 70,000 kits across more than 1,000 agencies, a shocking number that accounted for only a fraction of the nation’s police departments. 

Following up on that work, USA TODAY reporters spent the past year and a half investigating the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, including interviews and correspondence with more than 150 law enforcement officials, advocates, victims and others connected to backlog-clearing projects. Reporters also filed more than 250 public records requests, reviewed police reports from more than 350 cases with backlogged kits and asked 10 experts familiar with investigating and prosecuting sexual assault to review a selection of cases. 

Often, at the center of such cases were women who were particularly vulnerable to predators. 

They were sleeping on the streets, battling addiction, facing mental health challenges or simply drinking with friends. Some faced law enforcement skepticism from the minute they called for help, such as one Florida woman referred to by a sheriff’s deputy as a “potential victim” 45 times in a 40-line incident report. 

Most knew the men they said attacked them. Investigations often reached a stalemate at “he said, she said” – with one party saying the sex was consensual, the other saying it was rape and investigators doing little or no work to determine the truth. 

While the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative is meant to challenge the misconceptions about victims that have long plagued the criminal justice system, those biases remain.

A Florida prosecutor rejected a case after a kit was tested by noting the victim’s use of pain medication had impacted her “cognitive abilities.” A Minnesota police department decided to not test a kit because the juvenile victim had been “uncooperative” with their prior investigation, though records show the girl told police she feared she had been raped while passed out at a party and asked: “What if it was my fault?” A Wisconsin detective took no steps to reinvestigate a rape and noted that the suspect had claimed the sex was consensual, even though the same man had been convicted of raping someone else. 

Ashley Nix is a sex crimes prosecutor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose office has filed charges in numerous cases from the city’s backlog. One victim was a sex worker. Another died in the 12 years since she reported being assaulted, leaving Nix to prosecute the case without her testimony. A third woman – in a case Nix’s predecessor first rejected – was living with an intellectual disability.  

“These excuses about messy cases and messy victims … it’s BS,” Nix said. “This is what predators do. They pick targets that people won’t believe.” 

Krystal Allison, the woman who told Austin police that she had been raped by an acquaintance, said he knew full well that she was too intoxicated to fight back. She had become separated from a girlfriend on Austin’s bustling Sixth Street when the man stopped and offered her help. From there, her memories are fractured: falling off the handlebars of his bicycle, being in a bed, trying to push him off as he raped her. 

In the morning, Allison said, she realized she was at the man’s apartment, and his roommate told her she had been carried up the stairs the night before. She left, walked straight to a hospital, had a sexual assault exam completed and made a police report.  

That report would ultimately doom her chance at justice – because the officer wrote that Allison and the man had had “voluntary sex.” 

Years later, when the sexual assault kit was tested – and matched to another reported rape – that errant idea became canon, repeated over and over. If anyone had read Allison’s file more closely, they would have found numerous indications that what she reported was not voluntary, but rape.

In an interview with USA TODAY last month, Austin police officials acknowledged they made mistakes on Allison’s case, ones too late to rectify even if they wanted to. The statute of limitations to bring charges closed last year.  

Sgt. Patrick Stewart is one of several people at the police agency who reviewed the case and decided Allison did not need to be contacted. 

“Unfortunately, we dropped the ball on that one,” he said.  

USA TODAY does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission. Allison and several other women agreed to the usage of their names and photographs.  

Hearing from a reporter that the statute of limitations on her case had closed, Allison struggled for words. In the 11 years since she reported being raped, the now 40-year-old mother of two had not given up hope that one day her rapist would be arrested. When the police first closed her case and told her there wasn’t enough evidence to move forward, she recalls asking whether her investigation could be reopened if the man ever raped someone else. She said she was told it could be. 

“I truly felt that at some point, he would get caught. You don't get away with something like that forever,” she said. “You don't.” 

So far, he has. 

Lt. Chris Leleux, who oversees sex crimes investigations at the Austin Police Department, told USA TODAY he is disappointed that so few cases from the city’s backlog have resulted in convictions. When officials pledge to test old rape kits, though, he said they often naively present it as a panacea. 

“These cases,” he said, “they’re landing back into a flawed system.” 

Beyond unsolved rape cases, a broader swath of crimes

When police and prosecutors fail to hold rapists accountable, more people get hurt. They are raped and kidnapped. Stalked and harassed. Beaten and killed.

Rapists are often repeat offenders, research shows. And because so few sexual assaults are reported to police – roughly a third, studies estimate – the stakes for solving them are remarkably high. 

USA TODAY reviewed the criminal histories of more than 250 men named as suspects in rape cases where kits were not originally tested.  

Their backgrounds – before and after those kits were collected – are full of not only additional sexual offenses, but a litany of violent crimes including kidnapping, armed robbery, assault and child abuse. About 1 in 10 have been charged with domestic violence. 

A Florida man was convicted of domestic battery at least six times, including attacking a woman after she refused to have sex with him. A Wisconsin man slashed a woman’s tires and grabbed her by the neck, and then beat up a friend who tried to help her. A Minnesota man was required to register as a sex offender after groping a young girl in the Barbie aisle at Target.

All three men were also named as rape suspects. All three backlogged rape kits were counted as part of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. But none of the men was arrested in those cases. 

Neither was Mark Burruss. 

In 2013, a Wisconsin woman named Amber told police she had agreed to have sex with two men she met online but that the consensual encounter turned violent and the two men took turns raping her. A month later, she decided she did not want to pursue the case, and her rape kit was shelved. 

Three years passed before it was tested as part of Wisconsin's grant program. DNA found in the kit matched to Burruss, who had by then been accused of two sexual assaults against minors, court records filed by prosecutors show – the oldest dating to 1995.  

When interviewed by a detective, he said the sex with Amber was “rough” but had been entirely consensual. Amber maintained that it wasn’t. She told detectives she wanted to pursue the case this time around and hadn’t in 2013 only because her boyfriend discouraged her. 

But a prosecutor in 2018 declined to file charges. The office cited “credibility issues” with Amber because she initially had not been forthcoming about meeting the men online and had previously said she did not want to go forward with the case.

Two weeks later, Burruss groped a 13-year-old girl’s breasts and vagina over her clothing. The teen messaged a relative minutes after the assault, pleading with him to come get her. “I don’t feel safe,” she wrote. 

Burruss was convicted in that case and served two years in prison. He is currently awaiting trial on charges he raped an 11-year-old girl in 2016 – after Amber first came forward but before her kit was tested. He did not respond to a request for comment made through his attorney. 

Amber, who asked to use only her first name to protect her privacy, said that when she first reported her rape, a police officer told her that because she had met the men online and agreed to have sex with them, she “basically gave them permission to do whatever they wanted.” 

She did not know that Burruss had been convicted in another sexual assault after prosecutors failed to take her case in 2018, but she was not surprised. It was obvious, she said, that “he had done this before – and it wouldn’t be his last time.” 

Kit backlog shocks nation, spurs promise of reform

In 2009, one of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s assistants discovered 11,000 untested rape kits in a Detroit police evidence warehouse. Worthy was outraged. 

Officials in a handful of other U.S. cities had already found similar caches, and more communities would soon follow. 

These untested kits – estimated by one study to total between 300,000 and 400,000 – have come to be known collectively as “the rape kit backlog.” But that description is misleading. The word backlog implies they were in line to be tested. In reality, they sat forgotten. Some grew mold. Some were damaged in floods. Some lacked labels linking them to police reports, so they had to be manually catalogued one by one.

Public outrage built as media reports told the stories of unsolved rapes with untested kits. In 2010, the Joyful Heart Foundation, a nonprofit founded by “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” actress Mariska Hargitay, listed elimination of the backlog as its top priority. The same year, members of Congress convened one of many hearings, joining survivors and advocates who demanded to know: How did this happen? 

Research has since shown that decisions on testing were often left to the discretion of individual detectives. And too often, those detectives thought victims were lying. Their decisions were also impacted by changes in DNA technology and limited lab resources, leading many police to exclude entire categories, such as cases where they already knew the suspect's name. 

As Detroit and other cities began to test their backlogged kits, it soon became clear how misguided that mindset had been as the DNA in kits began matching to other cases. 

Men who raped strangers had also raped people they knew, and links among those cases identified serial rapists who had eluded police. In other scenarios, suspects who had claimed the woman consented to sex were now facing multiple accusations – turning “he said, she said” into “he said, she said, she said, she said.” 

In 2015, Joe Biden, then vice president, announced the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.  

“When we solve these cases, we get rapists off the streets,” he said. “For most survivors, seeing their rapists brought to justice, and knowing that they will not return, brings peace of mind and a sense of closure. The grants we’re announcing today to reduce the national rape kit backlog will bring that sense of closure and safety to victims while improving community safety.” 

Since then, the federal government has not only given grants to 90 state and local agencies but also hired a private nonprofit to provide training and assistance. Through that program, experts from across the criminal justice and advocacy systems are available to consult with local teams and have created training materials to guide their work. 

But their recommendations are ultimately just suggestions – which some teams have chosen to ignore.

Rebecca Campbell, a professor at Michigan State University, is part of the grant’s training program and has worked with dozens of sites. Campbell said it has been “eye-opening and difficult and challenging” to see the uneven results. In some places, she said, members of local teams have remained resistant even to the idea that the kits should be tested.

“There’s sort of a sense of, ‘Why in the world do we have this grant? Why are we doing this project?’” Campbell said. “And there’s active hostility to the project, the grant, because they don’t believe that there’s a problem.”

At the other extreme, she said, in some places officials have fully bought into the mission. For them, the challenge can be burnout and lack of resources. 

David Thomas, a law enforcement consultant and former program manager at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, has also worked with the grant’s training program. He said agencies that underperform need to be held to a higher standard. That starts with local police officials demanding thorough reviews of every case. And it extends, he said, to officials at the Department of Justice being willing to withhold grant funds.  

“We talk about ‘We need to hold perpetrators accountable,’” he said. “Agencies that aren’t living up to their promise … we need to hold them accountable.” 

The program has seen one of its greatest successes in Wayne County. The kits Worthy’s assistant found in 2009 have all been tested, resulting in more than 5,400 investigations and 257 convictions so far, according to the prosecutor’s office.  

Worthy, who was raped as a law student, said that within minutes of hearing about the kits, she knew she wanted to process them, resolve every case and make sure another backlog never developed. She wanted to change the culture that had once made it acceptable to stash rape kits in a dilapidated warehouse, like junk. 

Other city leaders were daunted by the cost, she said. Four years later, Detroit would file for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.  

Over time, Worthy scrounged together money to start addressing the backlog, even seeking private donations as small as $5. Nonprofit groups helped with fundraising, and the Detroit Crime Commission negotiated lower testing rates with private labs. Her office received a grant from the National Institute of Justice, as well as several grants from the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative totaling $9.5 million. The Michigan State Legislature allocated funds, and the county also increased Worthy’s budget to help support the program. 

Worthy said it has been a “long and difficult entangled road getting to where we are now.” She is frustrated by any agency that considers testing its kits alone a measure of success.  

“I can’t say you did nothing. But you didn’t do anything that’s going to lead anybody to justice if you didn’t do anything to seek to get these perpetrators, these rapists, off the street,” she said. “Because these rapists don’t stop.” 

Campbell, who has worked as a researcher with the Detroit team, said they set a standard every site should be striving to meet. 

“If you can do it under what I would argue are some of the hardest circumstances in the U.S.,” she said, “it is possible.” 

Despite DNA advances, law enforcement efforts fall short

In 2022, a state prosecutor in Jacksonville, Florida, reviewed a rape case from 2010 and decided, despite new DNA evidence, that there was no “reasonable probability of conviction.” The woman had taken a pain pill before the incident, impacting her memory. There were no witnesses to corroborate her account. And she had willingly gone into the suspect’s hotel room the morning after she claimed he raped her.  

It would be a tough sell to a jury.  

Unless you consider the same facts through a different lens. 

The suspect saw the woman take the medication, so he could have known that she would be groggy when he snuck into her room later that night. Most sexual assaults have no witnesses, and this woman had at least mentioned the rape to a friend who still recalled the conversation years later.  

And yes, she had gone into the man’s hotel room the day after the incident. While there, she covertly got his name off a prescription pill bottle – identifying her attacker for authorities.

If anything, the case developed new strengths with time, according to experts who reviewed the file for USA TODAY. When a detective reinterviewed the woman, she said the assault haunted her and she had been celibate ever since – evidence of trauma that could be compelling to jurors. When a detective interviewed the suspect, he denied ever having sex with the woman even though his DNA was found in her sexual assault kit – raising questions about his credibility. 

“What more do you want?” asked Elizabeth Donegan, a retired senior sergeant with the Austin Police Department and expert in investigating sexual assault. “To me this is an easy case to move forward. Super easy. You have a (prosecutor) that doesn’t know what they’re doing, doesn’t understand the crime of sexual assault.” 

A close examination of cases from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office shows the long odds for a backlogged kit to result in an arrest, let alone a conviction. Across the United States, it often requires near perfect conditions: first, a police agency with the resources, training and enthusiasm needed to reinvigorate old cases and, second, a prosecutor who has the skills and willingness to take a suspect to trial. One missing link can cause a case to careen off course. 

Some cases do not move forward because of reasons not easily overcome by police or prosecutors. Once tested, roughly half of backlogged rape kits have a useable DNA profile, and only half of those result in a DNA hit. A match could be to another case with an unknown assailant, providing police a lead but no name. The statute of limitations to bring charges might be closed. Or a suspect might be deceased.  

Frequently, officials say, people contacted following testing that happened years after the incident no longer want to pursue the case. Dropping the investigation at that point can cut both ways: It can honor a victim’s wishes or it can signal that police didn’t do enough to earn her trust.

But USA TODAY also found that police have given cases only a cursory review after DNA testing, instead relying on conclusions from the prior investigation. Lisae C. Jordan, executive director and counsel at the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said some agencies view the state’s backlog project as “second guessing” their decision not to test the kits to begin with. 

Prosecutors, too, have resisted giving investigations a fresh look. Katie Whisman, a former employee at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who oversaw the state’s backlog effort, recalled one local prosecutor telling police that they were wasting their time reopening investigations. The office had rejected the cases once and would not review them again.  

When asked why so few cases move forward, law enforcement officials are often vague. In Charlotte, North Carolina, records show authorities identified suspects in several investigations where women had reported being raped by armed attackers they didn’t know – including one who said she was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for five days. The cases were closed without arrests. Michael Stolp of the Mecklenburg County District Attorney's Office told USA TODAY that after review by police and a prosecutor, “consensus … was that an arrest and prosecution was not appropriate based on all the available evidence.” He didn’t elaborate on what evidence they relied on and did not respond when repeatedly asked if the victims had been told of the testing results.  

In Jacksonville, the prosecutor’s and sheriff’s offices have received nearly $10 million in federal grants since fiscal 2015. 

Investigations there have dragged on for years, sometimes with long stretches of no activity, a review of more than 100 files showed. The woman who reported securing her attacker’s name from a pill bottle in his hotel room first learned in 2017 that her rape kit had been tested. Records show she did not hear from a detective again for nearly two years. By then, a new investigator had been assigned. After that detective sent the case to state prosecutors in 2019, it took another 2½ years for the office to decline to file charges. 

“I didn’t quite realize there was another way for the system to traumatize victims,” said Kelsey McKay, a former prosecutor who founded a nonprofit focused on improving the way criminal justice professionals interact with sexual assault survivors. “If they have survived until now, now there’s some hope involved. And as you see with all these cases, now even with DNA, we don’t believe you.” 

McKay, who reviewed several cases at USA TODAY’s request, said that because most victims know their rapists and cases hinge on consent, police and prosecutors often focus on the victim’s credibility when they should be focused on the suspect’s.

She acknowledged that even the most skilled prosecutors face a steep challenge in convincing 12 jurors who might lack a nuanced understanding of sexual violence. But she said prosecutors need to be more willing to take on that challenge, including explaining to jurors that predators target vulnerable women because they know those women are less likely to be believed.  

Failing to prosecute, she said, just proves those perpetrators right.

McKay and the five other experts who reviewed the Jacksonville hotel case for USA TODAY all thought the prosecutor’s office could have filed charges.  

“If not this, what kinds of cases do we take with vulnerable victims?” she asked. 

In Jacksonville, prosecutors have filed charges in cases from the backlog that involve women who were homeless, intoxicated or using drugs. But almost without exception, those cases included another element: The victim said she did not know her attacker. Of 29 suspects the office has charged, 80% were accused of raping a stranger, in many cases women they kidnapped at knife- or gunpoint or with whom they had only briefly interacted before the assault.

Multiple studies have concluded that in almost all rape cases, victims know their attackers.  

The Jacksonville prosecutor’s office has not filed a single case where the suspect and victim had been in an intimate relationship. In the reports USA TODAY reviewed, detectives at the sheriff’s office often made little effort to investigate such cases after the kits were tested, closing many with the same language: “A review of the case showed that this was the same suspect named in the original investigation. Case remains Exceptionally Cleared.”

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Robert Freitas, who is part of the agency’s cold case unit and worked on investigations related to backlogged kits, told USA TODAY that as officials sifted through hundreds of DNA matches many cases remained difficult to prove because it was still a suspect’s word against a victim’s.  

“We’re not going to make an arrest just to make an arrest,” he said. “It’s unfortunate sometimes. You’ll see a match, but the state’s attorney has a higher burden of proof.” 

David Chapman, a spokesman for the State Attorney’s Office Fourth Circuit in Florida, told USA TODAY that the office hasn’t charged any backlog cases stemming from domestic violence because those suspects were already known to law enforcement during the first investigation. He described the federal initiative’s “main purpose” as prosecuting previously unknown assailants – even though participants are offered training on how to prosecute rapes involving partners and known parties. 

He added that when screening sexual assault cases from the backlog, his office weighs the fact that defendants can claim their due process was violated because of how long it took to bring charges. The office also considers other factors defense attorneys might highlight at trial. For example, he said, if a victim was a sex worker or using illegal drugs, the defense will say they had a motivation to lie.

Chapman provided a summary explaining how the office weighed several cases reviewed by USA TODAY. The first factor he noted: criminal histories of the suspect, as well as the victim.

“They are classifying an entire group of women as unrapable,” said Campbell, the professor who works with the grant’s training program. “That is absolutely unacceptable.” 

In another case from Jacksonville’s backlog, an 18-year-old woman in 2012 told the sheriff’s office that she had been raped by a man she knew only as “Charlie Fresh.”

That woman, Elizabeth Levy, told USA TODAY that she hasn’t forgotten how the deputy who took the report responded: He laughed as she struggled to recount the details while under the influence of crack cocaine.

Levy had gone to a motel near the interstate to buy drugs. She said Charlie offered to let her stay in his room – then gave her cocaine, refused to let her leave, threatened her and raped her. Soon after making a report to the sheriff’s office, she stopped responding to deputies’ calls.

Her sexual assault kit was tested in 2017 and matched to Charlie Pressley, a Florida man who had recently been convicted on felony drug charges and who, law enforcement records show, had twice been accused of sexual assault. In one of those cases, he was charged and pleaded to a lesser offense.

Even though Levy knew she could be attacked at a criminal trial – cast as untrustworthy and unsympathetic because she had gone to the motel to use cocaine – she agreed to help with the investigation. Shown a photo lineup, she picked out Pressley immediately. She told USA TODAY that she had only stopped pursuing the case because she was afraid of Pressley, and that had since changed. 

“I just wanted some justice,” Levy recalled in an interview earlier this year. “Honestly, seeing that mugshot of his face, it just did something to my soul.” 

The investigation that followed stretched 2½ years. Months passed with no activity. Detectives reinterviewed witnesses from the motel and looked for the other women who had accused Pressley of sexual assault. They also interviewed Pressley, who said he had never had sex with Levy. 

Over that time, officials lost contact with Levy, who was incarcerated when they first reached her but was released during the investigation. Though their protocols called for it, the sheriff’s office never connected Levy with a victim advocate who could have helped her stay engaged. Levy said she recalls one Facebook message from a sheriff’s deputy after her release, but by then she was again struggling with addiction. She also had lost faith in the detectives, who told her they would keep in touch and then went dark. 

She spoke with a detective only once after the photo lineup, sheriff’s office records show. He asked if she had agreed to have sex with Pressley in exchange for drugs.  

She maintained that it was rape. 

Three years after testing Levy’s sexual assault kit, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office in June 2020 again suspended the case and blamed Levy, writing “victim failed to cooperate” in the file. The prosecutor’s office told USA TODAY that there had been numerous inconsistencies in Levy’s statements and that her drug use while under court order not to use drugs “would call into question her reliability and credibility as to her version of events.”

Pressley, currently in prison on an unrelated drug conviction, did not respond to a request for comment. He is set to be released this fall. 

Levy was released from prison last week after serving 16 months for a parole violation on a drug charge. She recently graduated from an empowerment program for female inmates and is moving into a transitional house in Jacksonville.

She still struggles with blaming herself, both for the assault and for the fact that Pressley was never arrested. But she knows what happened wasn’t her fault. 

“I’m not going to lie and say I’m a saint, because I’m not. There are lot of things that I did that caused this situation to happen,” she said. “But I didn’t ask for it.” 

‘Nobody wants to apologize’

Officials from the Department of Justice have stressed that securing convictions is not the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative’s only goal, or even the main one. Williamson, who oversees the program, told USA TODAY the primary focus is resolving cases to provide “answers for victims or surviving family members.”

Yet most people whose sexual assault kits have been tested don’t even know they were tested, much less the results. 

Police in Wichita, Kansas, attempted to notify 17 victims from roughly 1,100 kits and were able to reach 11 of them. Two suspects have been convicted, and a warrant was issued for a third. 

Capt. Jason Stephens, who oversaw sex crimes investigations for the Wichita Police Department when Kansas in 2015 received a federal grant to address its backlog, said officials were concerned about upsetting victims by bringing up their rape if police had no plans to reopen an investigation. This means there are cases where police know who a suspect is, but the victim does not. 

That is exactly what Mary Stolz, executive director of the Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center, feared when she heard officials attempted to reach just 17 people. She considered a scenario where a woman moves next door to her rapist, or goes on a date with him, or he becomes her child’s teacher – all while the police know that man’s name and have not told her. 

“That is such an egregious violation of human rights,” Stolz said. 

Victim notification is arguably the most sensitive step officials face when clearing a stockpile of old kits. For one person, receiving a call about their sexual assault could serve only to open a wound. For another, it could help close a wound that never healed, providing not just information but access to resources such as counseling.

Faced with the dilemma, most grant sites have leaned on the side of limited contact. Of 42 notification policies obtained by USA TODAY, only eight recommend contacting all or close to all victims. At the other extreme, at least six policies directly link whether a victim is notified to whether authorities think their case could be investigated or prosecuted. 

USA TODAY examined victim notification rates for 14 agencies with early grants and the most complete notification statistics, comparing the number of victims contacted to kits sent for testing. The ratio does not take into account that some victims may have had more than one kit in the backlog.

Taken together, four of those 14 grantees with the highest rates notified about one person for every two kits sent for testing. The others reached just one victim for every 15 kits, and a few of those contacted barely anyone. In both Wisconsin and Orange County, California, officials reached one person for every 43 kits sent for testing. 

Campbell said some grant teams have been almost paralyzed by the fear of traumatizing survivors by bringing up their rapes and “practically convinced themselves that it would be unethical to contact victims.” In one meeting, she recalls saying with exasperation: “You just need to start.” 

Then there are other places, she said, where concern for victims has become an excuse to do nothing. 

“Somebody on that team has to come face to face with the survivor and whatever feeling that survivor has – anger, relief, fury, whatever it may be,” she said. “And they need to be able to have something to say. Hopefully it's an apology. And in a lot of jurisdictions, nobody wants to apologize.” 

Fewer than half of the policies reviewed by USA TODAY mention the need for an apology. The Duluth Police Department’s in Minnesota is one of them. 

Mary Faulkner, a victim advocate and Duluth’s grant site coordinator, said that when considering how to approach notification, the local team knew people across the small city of 90,000 residents had always wondered what happened to their cases. Perhaps some had even heard on the news or from a friend that the city was testing old kits and wondered if they would get a call. 

“We were very concerned about the sense that people would feel like they were forgotten twice,” Faulkner said.

Starting from an assumption that every victim would be contacted, officials only deviated if there was a specific cause for caution. The team refined its process as they saw what worked. Every victim they skipped, they documented why. 

From 444 kits sent for testing, Duluth attempted to reach 274 people. They successfully contacted 187 of them. Another 16 victims had died since making their reports. 

Prosecutors have filed charges in 21 cases and convicted seven people so far. 

Faulkner made many of the calls herself. Some did not go well, and those conversations stay with her. More often, people thanked her but said they had moved on with their lives. Some were curious about what was being done to make things better for victims now. And some said they had always wondered if their kit hadn’t been tested because of something they did wrong. 

“My hope is that it was helpful to have someone apologize and say that it wasn’t your fault,” Faulkner said. 

Jordan Martin has never received that kind of call. 

One evening in 2018, the Wichita woman decided to spend the night at a hotel, thinking it would be safer than driving home from a bar. An acquaintance offered her a ride, she said, and then followed her to her room and raped her.

She called the police in the morning. The detective’s questions were short and sharp, as if he was at the end of a shift and eager to leave, she said. A few weeks later, Martin got a voicemail saying her case had been closed. The suspect said they had had consensual sex. The police said nothing about whether her kit had been processed. 

“It just felt cold, that voicemail,” she said. 

Numb and angry, she turned to alcohol before realizing she needed help and reaching out to the Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center. In time she learned to cope better with her emotions and found purpose in helping others do the same. Today, Martin is the center’s director of advocacy.

Wichita police officials told USA TODAY that the department has instituted reforms to better respond to sexual assault, including increasing training and creating a comfortable room where victims are interviewed. The department announced a policy of testing all rape kits in late 2018, years ahead of the rest of the state.   

Martin said that since her own rape, she has seen the local police improve how they treat victims.

Yet it still bothers her that she has no idea what happened to her kit.  

“I did what the detectives – I did everything that they wanted me to do by talking with them, by going to the hospital before taking a shower to try to get this person off of me,” she said. “And for me just to always be like, ‘Well, damn, did they even care?’” 

Claims of success obscure shortcomings

When Iowa wrapped up its six-year grant program in 2021, the state’s Senate Democratic Caucus posted a celebratory message on social media: “After years of work, Iowa’s rape kit backlog has finally been eliminated!”

Except Iowa did not eliminate its backlog.  

It tested just two of every five kits that had accumulated in law enforcement storage rooms, the oldest dating to 1992. And the state still does not test all kits today. 

Kerri True-Funk, a member of the state grant team who worked for the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault, said that looking back, she wonders what could have been accomplished if Iowa law enforcement officials had used the initiative as an impetus for change. 

“It definitely could have been a pivot point for the state,” she said. “It could have done, maybe, not that 180-degree turn – it could have made a 90-degree turn. It could have moved the state forward.” 

Iowa’s Office of the Attorney General received its federal grant in 2015 and the following year surveyed law enforcement agencies across the state about their backlogs. In total, 4,264 kits were tallied. State officials, in news coverage and state reports, said that there would not be enough money to test them all.  

Iowa and other grant recipients have set their own criteria in deciding which kits to prioritize. The federal grant program recommends that sites test all kits from reported crimes. But at least a dozen sites have eschewed that suggestion and carved out exceptions.  

Kits were excluded for a variety of reasons, including if a suspect’s DNA was already on file from a prior case or if someone already had been convicted of the crime, eliminating the possibility that testing could clear someone wrongfully convicted.

Communities also have not tested kits from cases police concluded were “unfounded” – meaning they believed the victim made a false report or baseless accusation. Research shows police often overuse and misapply the label in sexual assaults. 

Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension last year announced that its testing was “complete,” and then explained that just two-thirds of kits were set for testing. In California, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office in 2022 said officials had “successfully cleared a 30-year countywide backlog of untested sexual assault kits” when it had processed less than half of the county’s kits. In Mobile, Alabama, at the end of negotiations among the grant team, about a quarter of backlogged kits were excluded from testing.

In Iowa, officials based their testing strategy on the reasons law enforcement officials said the kits were not tested to begin with, according to state reports. Cases that were prioritized for testing included those where the police had doubted the truthfulness of the accusation, prosecutors had not requested the kit be tested or the suspect claimed the sexual contact was consensual.  

But the state decided not to test another 1,300 kits – nearly a third of the backlog – for which police said the victim either did not want to file charges or had shown a “lack of cooperation” after reporting the assault. 

True-Funk said that at the time she was conflicted: She wanted to honor victims’ wishes but also raised concerns about testing based on how those wishes were summarized by police. People tend to disengage if they feel mistreated by law enforcement, she knew. They also change their minds.  

The backlog is littered with such examples. 

In one, a woman in Detroit told investigators that after her boyfriend had beaten and raped her, she stopped talking to police because she was young, afraid of retaliation and not emotionally prepared. Contacted after her kit was tested, that had changed.

“She now believes she has the strength to do it,” a detective wrote in the case file. Her rapist was convicted and sentenced to up to 18 years in prison.  

In Iowa, her kit likely would not have been tested. 

True-Funk said her concerns were drowned out at committee meetings, which regularly had about a dozen attendees representing law enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices but just a few advocates and one self-described sexual assault survivor. When the group later discussed how kits should be tested in the future, True-Funk said she was “shouted down.” 

In 2020, Iowa launched an online tracking system where victims can see if their kits have been tested. Yet police departments still have discretion over which kits to test.

And the state lab discourages them from sending a kit if they already know the suspect’s name.

“Where the issue is consent and not identity, please consider not submitting DNA evidence for processing unless needed,” the state lab’s submission guidelines read. Several police departments told USA TODAY they follow the lab's guidance.

A spokeswoman at the Iowa Department of Public Safety, which runs the state crime lab, did not answer questions about the policy and declined an interview request.

Many of the state’s backlogged kits not tested under the grant program are regularly ticking past the statute of limitations, which for adult victims is 10 years. USA TODAY found that at least 500 kits have passed that mark in the years since Iowa completed its inventory, and that number will swell to 625 by the end of next year. But the statute of limitations offers another possibility. In at least some cases, once a DNA identification is made, charges can be pursued for three more years. So if Iowa were to test those kits, it might result in new charges.

The kits that were tested resulted in about 300 DNA matches, leads sent to the local agencies where the cases originated. State officials said they couldn’t require local agencies to keep them updated on what happened next but were aware of 53 victims who were contacted after testing and four cases charged, three ending in convictions. Earlier this year, police in Davenport, Iowa, charged two additional men in connection with a backlogged kit tested under the program, according to local news reports. 

Officials at the Iowa Attorney General’s Office declined repeated interview requests. But in a statement, communications director Alyssa Brouillet maintained that the state cleared its backlog under the grant program. The argument, however, is semantics: Brouillet said that every kit “given to our office” was tested – “where there is evidence to be gained from testing … and the victim chooses to proceed criminally.” 

She also said that local police agencies notify all victims before the statute of limitations on their case expires. But USA TODAY found that doesn’t always happen. Police in Iowa City and West Des Moines said they don’t typically make such notifications.

After receiving $3 million from the Department of Justice, Iowa had great leeway in deciding how to spend the money.

The program does limit sites to spending only half the money on testing, though even then, they can request an exception. Federal officials want funds left over for the critical steps that come next – supporting survivors, investigating cases and convicting predators.

In Iowa, like most states in America, all those needs are urgent, and there is never enough money. Victim advocates often burn out on the low-paying job in a few years. Rural hospitals lack sexual assault nurse examiners or several facilities may have to share one. Iowa defunded its dedicated sexual assault hotline years ago. 

And yet, when Iowa finished its grant program, it gave up nearly a third of its funding, becoming one of dozens of grantees that together have left nearly $9.5 million unspent.

The $880,000 Iowa forfeited would have been enough to cover a weeklong training on investigating and prosecuting sexual assault for every county in the state. 

Or teach more than 500 nurses the basics of administering a sexual assault exam.

Or test a thousand more sexual assault kits collected – then neglected – long ago. 

Contributing: Dian Zhang and Savannah Kuchar, USA TODAY; Lee Rood, Des Moines Register

Tricia L. Nadolny, Nick Penzenstadler and Gina Barton are investigative reporters for USA TODAY. Jayme Fraser is a data reporter on the USA TODAY investigations team.

Nadolny can be reached at [email protected]. Penzenstadler can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at 720-507-5273. Barton can be reached at [email protected] or (262) 757-8640. Fraser can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal and WhatsApp at (541) 362-1393.