Drill music isn't making boys kill each other – knife crime is about something much deeper

Teenagers who kill are seen as gang members, criminals or dangerous thugs, not for what they really are. We need to look more closely at their trauma, and at our underfunded systems for dealing with it

Last night I heard police sirens. “Please, please not again.” There are so many stabbings; the police aren’t always called, but the A&E doctors tell us how many they treat. I then woke up to a bizarre discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme about whether drill music makes boys knife each other. God knows what’s happening when you have to quote Goldie Lookin Chain, but it was all a bit “Guns don’t kill people, rappers do”.

It would be a relief, in some ways, to think that music could be responsible for murder. Last week it was social media. Some days it is police cuts. Some days it’s the lack of stop and search. Some days it is white people taking drugs that cost black lives. None of this is new. None of it helps much when you see the flowers wilting against a wall and the women trying to keep their sons in at night and the grim-faced teenagers waiting for retaliation, wondering who will be next.

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ql7mRV