We speak to Patrick Green, CEO of The Ben Kinsella Trust, about knife crime and about the Let’s Be Blunt campaign started by Leanne Lucas, the yoga instructor stabbed at the tragic Southport stabbing incident where three young girls lost their lives.
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00:00Yeah, Leanne Lucas is an incredible person, you know, given the trauma that she suffered from that horrific incident in Southport.
00:10You know, like many people who are touched by knife crime, Leanne just wants to make a difference.
00:16And so what happened to her happened to somebody else.
00:21Her campaign, which has got a fantastic campaign name, let's be blunt, the idea that you don't have to have a pointed knife in your kitchen.
00:30In homicides, 42% of murders with a sharp instrument were conducted with a kitchen knife last year, 42%.
00:39It's by far above any other sharp instrument in terms of its use in murders.
00:46Can you give us a little bit more of a background into the organisation and what exactly it is you do and why you think that's such an effective approach?
00:54Yeah, I mean, we were set up 17 years ago following Ben's murder.
00:57We were set up with one reason in mind that the Kinsella family just didn't want what happened to them happening to anyone else.
01:04That's our driver.
01:05You know, our vision is a society free from knife crime.
01:08And, you know, helping young people identify real people lose their lives to knife crime.
01:13Real people just like you who have dreams, ambitions, and by one mistake, you know, their lives are ruined and the lives of everybody around them is ruined.
01:23And it's a really powerful message. It connects in a way that, you know, statistics doesn't.
01:27What role do you think that local communities, schools, families should be playing in preventing knife crime?
01:32And what more could be done to support these groups and these people with that sort of an effort?
01:37We should listen to young people.
01:38They're telling us something very, very important, and we haven't been responding to them for quite some time.
01:43They're telling us they are scared.
01:45They're telling us they don't feel safe where they live, where they socialise.
01:50We should be doing far more to help them feel safe and understand what their behaviours they're taking on to keep themselves safe and point them in the right direction.
02:00We have a resource for parents who teach us on our website, benkinsella.org.uk.
02:04It's free with a parent's guide to have that conversation and understand, you know, how to talk to young people around knife crime and have a constructive conversation.
02:13And for teachers, we have lesson plans.
02:15Youth workers, we have resources for you as well.
02:18Let's engage us, talk to young people about this subject.
02:20They know more about this than we think they do, and they are scared.
02:24And that's the one thing we can do is open that dialogue and try and lower the levels of fear that young people have.