Social work’s role in tackling knife crime

Professional Social Work magazine - 14 March 2019

Knife crime is a national emergency. It must be treated with the same sense of seriousness and urgency as terrorism. The government’s response has been to pump an extra £100 million into police forces, but this will not resolve the roots of youth violence completely. Knife crime is essentially a societal problem and therefore needs multi-layered responses to address it appropriately. 

What is sometimes lacking from the current debate is an understanding of this and a holistic approach based on compassion and understanding. Social work has a role to play here – it may not have all the answers, but it can be part of the solution.

Organised gangs are increasingly using young people to carry out their criminal activities. They exploit the fact their young recruits are more likely to be cautioned or given community orders, rather than imprisoned.

I recently spoke on BBC radio about the ‘divorce’ of criminal justice from social work in England. Examples of this include the splintering of the Probation Services and youth offending teams from children’s services; the specialisation of youth justice education; the lack of youth justice content in social work training and the purely punitive impact of ‘rehabilitation’ programmes.

This short-sighted approach is fundamentally flawed and damaging. Social work and criminal justice - in its broadest sense, with adults and young people - are intrinsically linked. If we want to make our streets safer, we need to rekindle the relationship between criminal justice, social work and community cohesion.

The media portrays a two-dimensional view of knife crime and wrongly polarises it into ‘offenders’ and ‘victims’. The reality is far more complex and multi-dimensional. Issues contributing to the current situation include lack of policing, the impact of austerity, the decimation of community resources, gang conflict, chaotic family lives, unemployment, substance misuse and school exclusion. These factors are, however, often glossed over.

Both victims and offenders are products of their environment and this needs to be more widely recognised. In some cases, both offenders and victims are known to children services, youth offending services or other local agencies. Let’s give these workers the training, time and resources to tackle the problem effectively.

Many young people are increasingly rejected by the education system and placed in part-time alternative education provision. But this is no substitute for proper full-time education and isolates them, heightening their vulnerability to various forms of exploitation.

Safe spaces where children and young people once congregated and socialised have disappeared making it easier for them to be exploited by sophisticated criminals. How can these socio-economic factors not require combined criminal justice and social work input?

Parts of the media perpetuate negative racial stereotypes of young black men and do little to spotlight the real-life factors that contribute to youth violence and knife crime. The ‘hostile environment’ of Brexit hasn’t helped, creating further racial tensions, dividing communities and marginalising disenfranchised black youths further.

We have to question why the lives of black young men appear to have less value. If the majority of knife crime victims were white, would the government response have been so slow? It’s unhelpful for youth violence to be framed as a ‘black problem’ as this encourages compassion fatigue and blame. 

In reality, knife crime is a societal problem and we need a multi-layered strategy with sufficient funding to tackle it. More can be done to educate the public about its wider context and to highlight counter-narratives. It’s so much deeper than ‘bored feral black youths killing each other for kicks’, as some choose to view it. This is about exploitation, self-defence and limited life prospects. 

We also need more positive black roles models to be given the limelight, such as the 56 Men project – which challenges the pervasive stereotyping of black men wearing hoodies or the artist/historian Akala whose wide-ranging work on black culture is highly-acclaimed. Not all black men wield knives – some of us are victims and some of us are intellectuals!

It’s important that as social workers we critically analyse the influence and impact of biased media coverage of youth violence. If we don’t, our professional values and ethics will be gradually eroded, diminishing our practice. Social work is fundamentally about relationships. It’s therefore helpful to identify resources that provide practical ways of working with young people involved in or affected by youth violence. They exist, but practitioners must be proactive in accessing them.

Additional police funding or targeted ‘stop and search’ alone will not eradicate knife crime. We need youth workers and reformed gang members to help us reconnect with young people and promote their citizenship.

We have generations of young people who wouldn’t know how to behave in a youth club or comply with employment and training expectations. Scared young men will rehearse their fears, sometimes in clumsy and inarticulate ways. We must ensure we are educating and providing them with the basic skills to contribute to society.

This article is published by Professional Social work magazine which provides a platform for a range of perspectives across the social work sector. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the British Association of Social Workers.