Knife Crime: A critical analysis of the new moral panic
Media reportage has been saturated this year by a dialogue concerned almost exclusively with ameliorating the ‘problem of knife crime’ in modern Britain. This discussion, and its intrinsic dialectic between rehabilitative and incapacitatory responses, has proliferated largely unquestioned amongst academics and journalistic commentators alike.
Contributing to public anxiety on the issue, such reportage has allowed a perception of knife crime’s ostensible proliferation to pass into a collective oratory convention with minimal reservation. This essay thus brings to the fore a radical perspective that questions this supposed prevalence and the recurrent opinion amongst almost 60 per cent of the population that crime is undergoing an unremitting rise.
This is not to belittle the harrowing and life-changing impact that violent crime has upon its victims, but to question the manner in which the issue has become so quickly engrained in our social consciousness as an established and undeniable fact of urban life. Indeed this exposition seeks at no point to repudiate the existence of knife crime as a dangerous and problematic quandary for communities and the modern criminal justice system. Yet, while inactivity and indecision may have profound implications for the future of community well-being and safety, the reportage and ensuing responses taken by actors may prove similarly injurious to society.
Because people’s personal identities are so strongly influenced by that which they are described as being, few productive outcomes can ever be derived from successive acts of negative categorisation. The significant transformation in social status borne of such labelling can be destructive to an individual’s sense of self, exacerbated in the case of knife crime where those less able to protect themselves, such as young people and black minorities, are being systematically stigmatised, alienated and isolated.
These social processes breed an atmosphere of disenchantment and bitterness toward the labellers in which the clear and inevitable result is for the inadvertent promotion and perpetuation of future delinquent propensity. In short, criminal behaviour becomes inflated in terms of both empirical actuality and media rhetoric; an outcome that no criminological perspective should ever be amenable to. This inflation forms part of the complex sociology of moral panics and deviancy amplification in which a public anxiety develops around an exaggerated perception of deviancy as fuelled by the media.
The negative consequences of this have been most famously documented in an empirical study by Stanley Cohen. In his analysis of the 1964 Mods and Rockers riots, he noted that minor anti-social disturbances – such as broken windows and the vandalism of beach huts – had received a unwarranted level of attention by the national press in which newspapers spoke of a ‘day of terror’, of young people who had ‘beaten up an entire town’, an ‘invasion’ by a ‘mob hell-bent on destruction’. However, Cohen’s analysis showed no evidence to substantiate such claims, with the typical offence during the disturbances being that of threatening behaviour and not physical violence or vandalism.
What resulted from such distorted reportage was the unfounded exacerbation of public concern that obliged the police to step up their surveillance and intervention. Inevitably, as has subsequently been seen with the American ‘War on Drugs’ and the British ‘stop and search’, the result was a sharp rise in the number of persons being arrested – people wrongly labelled and stigmatised by the media and public as deviant and a danger to the moral and social fabric of the nation. These arrests gave the appearance of confirming the validity of the media’s initial reportage, justifying further arrests and ever increasing levels of police activity. These preventative measures were thus borne not from a practical need to reduce harm but a widespread fear and anxiety toward an undeservedly oppressed social group. Further, while Stanley Cohen noted no Mod-Rocker polarisation during early disturbances, the media’s emphasis upon an antagonism between two groups and their stylistic differences encouraged youths to place themselves in one of the opposing parties. The polarisation that resulted again confirmed the media’s reportage, further exacerbating public concern without consideration to the fact that deviant identities had been formed subsequent to the reporting and not before.
In opposition to the popular assertion that we are experiencing an explosion in the proliferation of knife crime in the UK, this short essay takes the counterpoint that recent events are in large part a recurrence of the complex pattern of events outlined above and identified by Cohen. As a consequence of the damage that this deviancy amplification has been seen to cause to liberty, justice and the stigmatised individual’s sense of self, I feel it appropriate to offer a critique to the dominant discourse surrounding knife crime, offering an opportunity for balance and reflection. However, as this article relies heavily on official statistical measures, consideration must always be given to their limitations – namely their susceptibility to manipulation for political and economic purposes by actors on both sides of the argument.
Perhaps the most startling figure to arise from this recent panic was the assertion by the Independent on Sunday that 14,000 people each year are victims of knife crime. This attention-grabbing statistic is unquestionably a startling and worrying one on its own, but when qualified against its original source, this number was found to include “accidental injuries from knives and other sharp implements”, which made up half of the overall figure.
And this statistic is not alone in failing to support the media’s claim that we are in the midst of a social and criminological crisis. In an almost direct negative correlation with public opinion on the issue, crime has consistently declined since its highs of 1995, reaching in recent years a point of equilibrium that rests at almost half that of the mid-1990s. While this relates to knife crime overall, similar positive trends have been highlighted with reference to violent crimes. Here, according to the British Crime Survey, overall violent crime has decreased by 41 per cent since the peak of 1995, with knife crime constituting 6 per cent of all violent incidents in 2007-08; a figure largely constant for the past decade.
In both positive and negative respects some commentators have alluded to that fact that since Labour came to power in 1997, the number of people prosecuted for possessing knives has increased by 72 per cent, to 7,699 in 2006. But this should never be used as evidence of a growth in knife crime. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall correctly argues, criminal statistics are organisational as well as social products in which changes in police policies and priorities can have a dramatic effect on headline statistics and people’s perception of a crime’s prevalence. With its move up the political agenda, Hazel Blears herself commented that “The increase in the figures is due to the increased police activity on Friday and Saturday nights in city centres and that leads to many more of these incidents being recorded.”
On Thursday 17th July the Daily Mail newspaper led with the headline “Knives: why no part of Britain is safe”, yet the empirical evidence discussed suggests that, rather than being a national epidemic, the problem of knife crime is highly localised and situated amid a national climate of declining delinquency. Illustrating this assertion is the simple fact that all of the recent high profile stabbings – 21 at the time of writing – have occurred within the spatial confines of London, a city accountable for 55 per cent of last year’s knife and gun crime attacks. Thus, in conflict with the Daily Mail’s contentions, not a single fatal stabbing has taken place outside of the London area this year.
What is being witnessed instead is largely an adjunct to the already long-running moral panic around young people, in which public anxiety and uncertainty are being resolved by identifying a publicly visible social group as a scapegoat and a symbol of what is wrong with today’s society. With newspapers such as The Sun demanding that the perpetrators – “evil people” – be subject to “more arrests, stiffer sentences and more jails”, the criminal justice system needs to be careful not to get caught up the whirlwind of unconstructive rhetoric that has been filling the written and visual media over recent months. Thankfully, aside from some commentators blindly and simple-mindedly advocating a return to eighteenth-century penal routine, some consideration is being given to the deeper, underlying motivators behind knife crime.
All too often do the processes of criminalisation inadvertently divert attention away from the social and political dynamics that raise criminal propensity, removing tolerance and legitimacy from organised campaigns by the subjugated minorities that strive to highlight their real and important grievances: restricted opportunities; poor education and skills; spatial isolation; deprivation. Recent reporting about knife crime has been out of proportion to the scale of the problem – as least so far as can be judged from statistical measures – and has served only to shift focus away from the social issues that do the most harm to society.
As food for thought I finish on a point raised by Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London: Far more young people kill themselves each year than are killed by others, but where’s the public outcry about that?
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