Knife crime has left London’s young people reeling.

At 11pm last Tuesday, I said goodnight to a friend outside a pub in Kentish Town in north-west London. By the time we both got home – about a mile in distance – each of us had passed a murder scene: four young men were stabbed that evening, in at least three different locations. Two of them died.

At the police cordon by the junction of the nearby Islip and Bartholomew Road and the Peckwater estate, a large group of Somali women spoke anxiously into their phones. It felt like so many of the scenes we’ve seen in London over the past year: a shocked community coming together from different backgrounds to deal with tragedy. A young boy, now known to be Abdikarim Hassan, 17, had been fatally stabbed outside a corner shop.

There was further trauma to come. News spread first of another stabbing in King’s Cross – a 16-year-old boy who escaped with his life – and then the killing of Sadiq Aadam, 20, in Camden. Word got round on Snapchat and Facebook as plugged-in teenagers told each other to stay home.


Source : theguardian