IT used to be suggested, with ample evidence to support the view, that social trends in western society began in the USA, reached Britain ten years later, then took another ten to percolate across the Channel to Jersey.

Technology may have tightened the timescale, but the principle broadly holds good, which is why there is no room for complacency when it comes to consideration of how the Island should approach the scourge of knife culture.

As with the wider issue of street crime – the subject of an in-depth examination by this newspaper all last week – the fact that things are not yet as bad in Jersey as in some other places is neither here nor there. The question is: what should be done to prevent it becoming so? In some parts of the UK, the escalation of knife-carrying among groups of young men has already reached inevitably tragic levels. This is one trend which, all agree, we must keep out.

In planning how best to do so, Home Affairs Minister Ian Le Marquand has decided not to pursue the idea of proposing a special new law against knife crime. He is right. Appealing though it may be to single out the problem for separate legislation, there is a danger that this would amount to a counter-productive political gesture rather than a helpful measure. Laws already exist to prevent the possession or use of offensive weapons of all kinds. Effort must be concentrated on enforcing them ruthlessly and effectively rather than on drafting complex new rules which would simply add more layers of bureaucracy while also potentially drawing into the net many perfectly innocent users of knives, whether for work or hobbies.

Clearly the courts have an important part to play by imposing deterrent sentences on anyone caught in possession of a knife for criminal purposes. The most important battle of this war, though, is the one to be fought through education, and with a clear target audience of male teenagers. It is this group to whom the message must be vividly conveyed that carrying a knife is neither cool nor glamorous, but is
an anti-social short-cut to the destruction of their own lives, as well as the lives
of others.

Crime prevention agencies, including the States police and the voluntary Prison! Me? No Way! group, are already doing excellent work in this area. As the general struggle to keep our streets safe grows more difficult, development of even more open, honest dialogue with the Island’s young people, reinforced by a range of systematic measures from knife amnesties to confidential reporting, will be a vital weapon in the armoury.