This week, possessing, owning, transporting or selling machetes and zombie knives – those longer than eight inches and serrated on one edge – became imprisonable offences. Since 2016, a bizarre loophole in the Offensive Weapons Act has meant that these “statement” weapons could be legally kept and sold if they do not have violent imagery printed on their handles. But campaigning spearheaded by Idris Elba this year has helped to make changing the law a priority across both Conservative and Labour governments.
For the past month, in the build-up to the ban, knife amnesty bins have been rolled out across the country for people and businesses to deposit their weapons. Sometimes, they’ve received financial compensation in return: one knife wholesaler based in Luton reportedly surrendered 35,000 zombie knives in exchange for £10 a blade.
As violence among young people has hovered at an unprecedented high over the past five years, mentions of large-blade weapons in crime reports have doubled. Being a youth worker in London has shown me how prevalent zombie knives, machetes and swords are in teenage lives, conversations and social media posturing. Trying to halt this with statutory tools makes perfect sense. So does creating a legal disincentive for adults making money from selling weapons that are clearly designed to cause serious harm.
In other words, the ban is a welcome step forward. But as one small door closes, many bigger ones remain ajar.
One question is how the ban will be monitored. Zombie knives have been cheaply available from online retailers for years. They can be delivered in disguised packaging with misleading labels. It’s not hard to see how black market retailers will continue to sell them, albeit at a lesser rate.
And will it affect the larger landscape of knife violence? The government started recording the types of blades used in murders in April 2022. A total of 244 homicides involving sharp instruments took place in England and Wales in the year ending March 2023. Of these, 14 involved machetes, seven zombie knives and three swords. These are significant numbers; any murder is a preventable tragedy. But kitchen knives – free, legal and readily available to anyone, anywhere, any age, providing there is one in their home – were used 101 times.
The fundamental problem, though, is that the ban will not stem deeper, darker forces that are at play in a person’s life when they choose to pick up a knife – or worse, when they are forced to use it to defend themselves, or decide to attack someone. It is primarily fear that drives children to carry weapons. The most vulnerable, absent and excluded young people need to feel less scared, more safe and that their lives matter.
It is possible to help them. There are many things we can do, and that are being done all over the country, that are deserving of a spotlight. Last week, I visited the New Parks youth centre in west Leicester, where bouquets of flowers rested on the curb outside the entrance in memory of a local teenager. The building is in the heart of a community and violence hotspot in which the city’s Violence Reduction Network (VRN) is delivering the Reach programme across a growing range of schools, matching youth workers with students at risk of exclusion. Mentoring pairs meet once a week for six months and focus on themes like relationship building, social skills and self-confidence.
In the same area, the VRN is also delivering the Phoenix programme, an innovative, focused US deterrence approach introduced in 1990s Boston. It involves clearly communicating the consequences of violence to those most entrenched in it – with the help of a community navigator who has relatable lived experience to explain what is likely to happen if the participant continues down a violent path – and the offer of intensive support for developing routes out of it, such as education, employment or therapy.
Unlike knife surrender initiatives, for which there is not yet any evidence that they effectively reduce violence, a growing body of international research has found that focused deterrence is one of the most effective strategies.
The two programmes described above are very different. Reach is primary prevention, to stop children becoming involved in violence in the first place. Focused deterrence is what is known as secondary or tertiary prevention, to stop violence happening again in someone’s life. But both are driven by a public health approach that treats violence as a symptom of wider social breakdown whose myriad causes must be addressed at root. Both involve a partnership of multiple services – across youth offending teams, teachers, police, healthcare professionals, children’s services, and more – and combine rigorous data with local expert knowledge to target those who need help most.
Investing resources, energy and argument into these tried-and-tested types of interventions might allow the new Labour government to get near to achieving its bold aim of halving knife crime in a decade. The pending rollout of the party’s young futures programme is a promising start in principle. But it is early days.
Christian d’Ippolito, co-founder of the impressive London-based organisation Steel Warriors, who melt down knives handed in by members of the public and reuse the metal to build free outdoor gyms, was recently asked about the overall effect of the zombie knife ban. He didn’t so much offer a last word as an insistence on moving to the next steps. “It’s much needed, it’s definitely a step in the right direction, but I think fundamentally what we need to do is focus on behaviour change,” he said.
Indeed, to properly prevent knife crime, we must look beyond the blade. After all, there is a hand holding on to it, and behind that, the mind of someone who is deserving of our compassion and respect. It is urgent that we find more ways to show young people that their lives have value, before it is too late.
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Ciaran Thapar is the director of public affairs and communications at the Youth Endowment Fund and the author of Cut Short
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