LONDON: A teenager lies in a pool of blood in the street after he is stabbed in a dawn attack. A day later, a father of three is knifed to death in front of his daughters in a struggle with a neighbour after a family fun day.

A mother mourns her 19-year-old son, Thomas Grant, who was stabbed through the heart as he tried to stop a fight on a train. Children lay flowers at the school gates where Kiyan Prince, a promising footballer aged 15, died in a knife attack.

Britain is living ‘in the shadow of the knife’, as one tabloid headline writer put it. And experts fear the number of fatal stabbings will spiral out of control if a growing knife culture among young people is not tackled.

“We’ve got a war on our streets ... and the trend for violence is getting worse,” says Lyn Costello of the campaign group Mothers Against Murder And Aggression (MAMAA).

Figures show that six per cent of all violent crimes in Britain are knife-related. More than a quarter of the 820 homicides in 2004/5 involved sharp instruments, and in London alone, there were more than 12,500 knife-related incidents last year.

The peak age for knife crime is 15 to 18 years. Data shows 41 per cent of those accused of robbery using a knife were in this age bracket, as were 17 per cent of the victims.

Experts blame the emergence of a youth culture where violence is endemic and where parents find it hard to restrict their children’s exposure.

“The underlying issue is inner-city youth culture,” says Diane Abbott, a Labour member of parliament in north London.

“Young children grow up in a society where the music, the video games and the films are all saturated with violence.”

As Britons are bombarded with headline after headline about lethal stabbings, there are plans for US-style school gate searches to stop children taking knives into class, and the government has announced a five-week national knife amnesty to encourage people to hand in weapons without fear of prosecution. Posters warn people to ‘Turn in that knife before it’s turned on you’. Police hope to get thousands of weapons off the streets before the amnesty ends on June 30.

“Too many people think that carrying a knife will make them safer, but the reality is quite the opposite,” said Vernon Coaker, junior interior minister, as he launched the campaign.—Reuters