Knifed for ‘likes’: Horrified after witnessing a stabbing on her doorstep, Radio 4 presenter Kirsty Lang investigated –
As a former news reporter who worked amid the violence of the former Yugoslavia
At first, I thought the commotion outside my house was caused by revellers pouring out of the local pub.
It wasn’t long before Christmas and, as I got ready for bed, I assumed the raised voices came from too much seasonal goodwill rather than anything more sinister.
It was only when the flashing blue lights of an ambulance lit up my bedroom that I pulled back the curtain.
There, sprawled on the pavement outside my house was a teenage boy. A paramedic was bent over him, trying to staunch the blood I could clearly see flooding from his abdomen.
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Later, when a police officer rang my doorbell to ask if I’d seen anything useful, he told me it was the second attack on a teenager he had attended in the area in 24 hours. That night I couldn’t sleep.
As a former news reporter who worked amid the violence of the former Yugoslavia as it fell apart, this was not the first time I had seen a young man bleeding from a terrible wound.
But this wasn’t the Balkans. It had happened on my doorstep, outside the house where I raised my own son, on the streets where he once walked to and from school every day.
Shepherd’s Bush is a mixed area of West London. Large, run-down council estates lie a stone’s-throw from smart streets inhabited by journalists, broadcasters and a few well-known actors.
Of course, I’d been concerned for my son during his school days, worried he might be mugged for his mobile phone.
But stabbings, on the other hand, had seemed to be another matter – a horror confined to rival drugs gangs, probably in different parts of London.
Like everyone else, I’d seen the disturbing reports showing that the number of fatal stabbings in England and Wales is soaring – in fact, they have just recently reached their highest level since records began in 1946.
97 likes: Glorifying a series of violent assaults in London shops, this film was uploaded with the hashtags #ukdrill #lol. Drill is slang for shooting and stabbing
Until that night before Christmas, however, gang stabbings didn’t intrude on my comfortable middle-class existence. Only then was I jolted into paying real attention.
Like many parents, I had no idea at all. It was my grown-up son, who is studying sociology and has an interest in youth crime, who explained the shocking way that social media now dominates the lives of our teenagers.
Perpetrators film their attacks and post the videos on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube, glorying in the violence and using the attention they receive from their followers – particularly the votes of approval in the tally of ‘likes’ – to score points with their rivals.
