I’VE read the news coverage of knife crime in Britain of late with the words ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ in my mind.
Our society is once again - rightly, understandably - trying to make sense of terrible crimes where young men have used knives and young lives been lost to knives. People reach for solutions: mandatory prison sentences for first-time offenders carrying a knife. We’ve been here often. Death. Anger. Fear. Reaction.
What I’m about to write is freighted with deep personal discomfort. Perhaps I’d have said "shame" in the past. My emotions, though, are irrelevant. What matters is my motive, and that’s simple. I want people - particularly middle-class people - to get some insight into why young men carry knives, and why between the ages of 14 and 17 I carried a knife.
This was long ago. Let me first explain the moment I decided I had to carry a knife. It was summer, 1984.
I grew up on one of the most violent housing estates in Northern Ireland. People were murdered there. Kicked to death. Stabbed. Terrorism was far from my country’s only curse.
One Friday, three friends and I were out, around 10 at night. We weren’t up to mischief, just walking the streets, talking, laughing. For working-class kids in estates like this, there was nothing else to do.
A gang of a dozen skinheads walked past, aged between 18 and their early 20s. They turned. I and my mates knew instinctively what was coming. Before we could run, they were on us. We were 14. They were men. We hadn’t a chance.
Neil Mackay talks to Niven Rennie about youth crime
I woke up in hospital. So did my friends. My teeth were kicked out. I’d lost consciousness, but the policeman by my bed told me I was lucky to be alive. The gang had beaten my head off the ground with such ferocity that an off-duty cop, in a nearby house, heard the noise, emerged and pulled his gun.
The skinheads fled, but not - so I’m told, as I’ve no memory of this - until the leader of the gang gave one final kick to my head. Out and down. There was no motive for the attack. It was just for thrills.
So I decided to carry a knife. Many boys my age made the same decision, for protection, from fear. Is that right? No. Is it understandable? Yes.
In my housing estate, you learned to fight or got trampled on. As you got older - as you entered your teens and those fights became uglier, more violent, when you yourself became a target for murderous, random street attacks - it was almost a rite of passage for boys to carry knives. I’d learned to handle myself physically, but I couldn’t handle a gang of men. So the knife was my choice.
Amid the anger and panic over knife crime, if we don’t address the fear young men feel on the streets of our most dangerous housing estates, we’ll achieve nothing.
Niven Rennie (Image: Newsquest)
Did I ever use a knife? No. Did I pull it? I’m afraid to say I did. But only in self-defence. Only to stop another attack.
The need to carry a knife was underscored to me one night when I was at my school disco. I was about 16. I couldn’t bring a knife into school, in case it was discovered. On the way home, a pal and I were once again attacked by an older gang numbering about seven. I was back in hospital.
School, in fact, presented something of an irony to me at this age. I was a bright kid. I’d passed the necessary exams to get into one of the best grammar schools in the country. So here I was, by day studying Latin, told by teachers that I could become a writer, doctor, scientist, actor , whatever I wanted.
Neil Mackay on the poverty breeding Scotland’s violent crime wave
Yet, on the way home from school, the closer I got to that estate I grew up on, I felt utterly naked without my knife. My skin prickled with fear and sweat if I saw an older group of teenagers I didn’t know. I still remember that knife - bone-handled, six inches long. It was brutal. But it made me feel safe.
After straight As at A-level, I got the hell out of that estate. I seldom went back. University was salvation. I’ve never carried a knife since. I never wanted to carry one in the first place. But in some parts of Britain, for young men, survival is Darwinian.
Evidently, there was every chance that by carrying a knife, I put myself in greater danger. It’s not unusual for the kid who carries a knife to be stabbed by their own weapon. But that doesn’t change how young men, from backgrounds like mine, think in these circumstances. I know what street crime and gang culture mean first-hand.
Years later, I became friends with Niven Rennie, one of Scotland’s leading police officers who later headed up the Violence Reduction Unit, acclaimed for halving Glasgow’s knife crime.
Niven champions a public health approach to knife crime. Offending often has roots in poverty, hopelessness and fear. Give those young men with knives in their pockets some opportunities, some sense of safety, and chances are the knife will disappear.
Neil Mackay on growing up in violent Northern Ireland
Mandatory sentencing for possession only drives young men into prison, where they become criminalised for life.
Earlier, I said I’d felt shame around this past life of mine. I don’t any more. I’ll tell you why.
Do you know the story of the Ship of Theseus? It’s a metaphor for change. Theseus sets sail and travels for years. Along the way, he stops in ports and changes the mast, the oars, the rudder. By the time he returns home, not one part of the original ship remains. What was once, is no more.
I’m no longer that teenager. So I won’t feel shame for the circumstance which made me do what I did. I feel regret and pity: the same feelings I hold for any young man today who believes he has no alternative but to pick up a knife, and perhaps send his life and the lives of other young men on a path to destruction.
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