Knife crime in Bristol has had a devastating impact on so many across the city, and a number of different initiatives are under way to try and combat the rising level of crime. More bleed kits are being installed across Bristol, surrender bins are popping up across the city and children as young as nine are being taught how to use bleed kits.
Now 12,000 young children a year will be taught how to use bleed kits to save someone’s life when having a catastrophic bleed, and while it has its merits, how scary is it that this is the world we live in now? Children will be taught about knife crime as a whole and the consequences of knives, it is mind-blowing that this is now happening.
It feels crazy to me. Children should be able to enjoy themselves and be free, they should not have to worry about if someone is bleeding out. They should be able to play and learn. It isn’t the time to be putting more and more pressure on children, the world is complex enough.
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When a child is nine, or in Year 5, they learn about sex education. Children learn how to read at a more advanced level, start to learn about science or start to get truly invested in sports. Now we live in a world where knife crime is part of the remit.
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I feel that children, not just at nine but of all ages, have enough on their plate to think about. New schools, exams, thinking about their future, learning basic skills like learning how to interact with one another, or learning how to cook or wash up, we should be protecting children, not exposing them to something that is incredibly traumatic and life-shattering.
When I was nine, I would walk to primary school with my friends, we never had smartphones and while we knew there were some dangers, we knew that as long as we stuck together, we’d be fine.
It is just so mentally exhausting to think how things have changed so fast so quickly. It’s not that there’s danger, because there always has been, but it’s that fear that is happening on our doorsteps across the city, and I feel for the children of today, they are going to end up losing their childhood and their innocence because of the state of knife crime.
The saddest thing about all this is that teaching children about bleed kits may end up helping prevent more lives being lost, It is a genuine tragedy that it will end up with children becoming normalised around knives.
More has to be done to stop knife crime getting a stranglehold on our lives. The “Together for Change” campaign we launched, for example, has seen so many ways in which knife crime has affected not just the family of a victim but the whole city.
So much work is being done behind the scenes to be able to make a difference, whether it is the knife angel touring the country, retailers being tested on selling knives to 13-year-olds or those pushing for harsher sentencing on those caught carrying knives.
But the whole idea of getting children trained up on bleed kits, for whatever good it could bring, I feel like we have failed our one duty to protect the kids for the future. Let’s just hope that one day, the lesson we teach those kids is a lesson for the rest of us about the real impact of knife crime.
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