Knife crime has been ignored for too long / Guardian, 10 July 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/10/knifecrime.ukcrime1?gusrc=rss&feed=uknews
Angela Phillips
"It's dangerous being a young man, always has been. Young men are twice as likely as young women to be the victims of crime, and knifing – often as the result of an argument – has long been the most common method of dispatch. In fact, it's so common that, when I first started teaching journalism in the mid-90s, I set up an exercise in which the task was to arrange crimes in order of their news value. The stabbing of a young man after a fight came at the bottom of the list. It was already such a common occurrence that it was unlikely to make it into the pages of a national paper. Child murder, on the other hand, was usually a headline-grabber due to its rarity. So what is going on and why are newspapers monitoring every incidence of stabbing and checking on the sales of "stab vests"?"