There Is no Home Office Definition of Knife Crime

Knife violence has become a topic of great urgency in British society, politics and culture. Hardly a day goes by without further news of brutal stabbings and tragic violence. Yet despite the current preoccupation with ‘knife crime’, stretching back some two decades, a peak in knife violence around 2007, and a resurgence in the problem ten years later, with relatively few exceptions, there has been surprisingly little detailed criminological attention given to it. Although the problem is treated as a matter of fact, a largely self-explanatory label, many commentators have repeatedly acknowledged the difficulty in establishing a consistent, workable and evidence-based definition of ‘knife crime’. What we call ‘knife crime’ consists of a range of different offences and, as our timeline shows, a ‘knife enabled’ code first entered police crime recording in 2001 but it was only in 2011 that year on year comparable knife crime data became available. Subsequently, the inclusion of ‘aggravated’ knife possession offences in the knife crime figures (themselves subject to police activity rates), has further complicated attempts to clarify ‘knife crime’ trends. Yet fears and concerns about knife crime have always been driven by more than just the numbers, such as: the state of youth, urban safety, ‘dangerous others’, even though more than half of contemporary knife violence is inflicted by adults and much of it occurs in more ‘domestic’ contexts. In this chapter we examine both the scale and nature of contemporary knife-enabled violence, and ask to what extent ‘knife crime’ can be defined and understood as a distinct category of offending. In recognising the contradictions and challenges here we begin to outline a framework for a new understanding of knife crime, in order to rethink and revise existing responses.