An overview of the context of knife crime and the efforts to address serious youth violence in the UK

Over the past 15 or so years, serious youth violence has continued to be a significant concern, affecting cities across the UK. Although overall incidents of violence are decreasing, those that end in a fatality are rising again. What was initially seen as a gang issue now has a broader impact, with only around 20 per cent of knife crime events being flagged by the police as gang related (Massey et al, 2019). Street drug dealing has also developed, changing the risks those involved face. Drug markets were once understood to be controlled by local groups. Yet, due to supply saturation, many young people are first engaging in the drugs trade through exploitative county lines operations where adults send children to other areas of the country to deal for them. This has contributed to the spreading of violence and the sense of isolation felt by many young people involved in this type of activity.

For more than a decade and a half, successive groups of young people on St Mary’s Estate, a deprived 882-property housing estate in South London, have been caught up in these developments, engaging in street dealing and the violence associated with it. Through charting their experiences, this book sheds further light on the lives of those exposed to serious youth violence and the effectiveness of efforts to try and support them.

This is a study of where I lived, volunteered and sometimes worked for over 16 years. Despite trying to capture something of the estate, I am well aware that there are many other histories, stories and life experiences that I haven’t even touched. Initially, I wanted to explore how the changing power and relational dynamics on the estate impacted the way people interacted with each other. I was fascinated by how a small group of residents believed in trying to find informal solutions, despite a host of local authority officers constantly telling them they couldn’t do it.