This year, the Guardian has been tracking the knife killings of young people in the UK in an attempt to understand the scale of an issue on which there is no national, publicly available data. As we have marked more than 30 deaths of children and teenagers, sometimes at the hands of their peers, we have also tried to understand the underlying issues. Throughout this project, called Beyond the Blade, we have attempted to consider why young people are carrying deadly weapons and how they might be convinced to change course.

Whitney Iles, 30, has already devoted half her life to finding out the answers to these questions. She is the CEO of Project 507, a social enterprise that implements peace-building and diversion strategies across London and counsels those already in jail to help them understand the roots of their behaviour.

Beyond the blade: why have we launched this project? There is no publicly available national data on the number of children and teenagers killed by knives in Britain. That is why we have decided to count these fatalities in 2017. Beyond the blade aims to mark the death of every child or teenager killed by a knife, finding out as much as we can about their short lives and exploring the issues around their deaths. We plan to investigate the impact of knife crime upon Britain’s young people and expose the myths that surround it. Keep up to date with our progress on this project

In this role, Iles has taken a step back from frontline work in order to challenge what she sees as the systemic conditions that lead young people to violence. The first step, she says, is to recognise the trauma suffered by young people as a result of living in a violent society.

Here she considers what might be at the root of violence among young people, and how it could be tackled.

In your experience, why do young people become violent?



“It’s not a question that can be answered simply, because you have the individual stories of each of those young people and what they’ve been through, and then you also have the context of the situation that those young people are in. And until we start looking at both the individual as well as the context we’re really not going to come up with solutions that work for everyone.



“A young person could have gone through multiple traumas in childhood – such as neglect and/or abuse, which may or may not have a negative affect on their behaviour. They could be violent due to being previously stabbed or seeing domestic violence as a child. But also then you have poverty, you have oppression, which are arguably are the worst types of violence because they affect so many people.



“You have to consider the context of the situation, which could be living in a poor community – which affects many children. It can determine the type of help and support available to that young person; how much one-on-one time they’d get from a teacher in school, waiting time for appropriate mental health services, access to youth centres and opportunities, etc.

“There’s all these contextual things that play a part in creating the narrative and the context for those young people to live in, and when you mix that with experiencing particular types of violence and trauma in your childhood then it’s a kind of double negative.”

How do you think the experience of trauma might spark violence?



“The easy way to look at it is that we all have this bubble around us that protects us from the world, because if we were to get all the information that is thrown at us, our brain wouldn’t be able to cope. Trauma is anything that can pierce that bubble.

“It’s different for every single person. So, we could both go out and see a traumatic incident, and it would affect us differently, due to many different factors. When people have experienced trauma, sometimes they do well and they recover. But other people could suffer from something like post-traumatic stress. That might lead to paranoia or hyper-vigilance — a lot of what we see in our young people.

“The key thing to know about trauma is that the intensity of the memory does not fade. So if you have a young person who is paranoid and hyper-vigilant due to the trauma they have experienced, and on top of that is living in a community where many other young people are paranoid and hyper-vigilant, any small action can throw things off balance and cause chaos.

“There is a self-fufilling prophecy at play, by thinking the world is out to get you and that you have to defend yourself by any means necessary, you create a world where your life is at risk.”

You have said that violence is everywhere. What do you mean?



“When we think of violence we think of severe physical acts like someone shot someone, someone killed someone, someone raped someone. Violence can actually be a lot more subtle. It doesn’t have to be physical, it can be psychological, it can be emotional; we’re seeing a lot more violence online, a lot more bullying.

“We have a lot more micro-aggression, especially being British. It seeps into our day-to-day lives, especially this issue of one part of society thinking they’re better than another part of society.

“If you look at violence as an act that does harm to others – it could be psychological harm, emotional harm – then you can see how we can cause harm to each other even when intentions might be good.”

What role do you think knives play in youth culture?



“Everything is communication. Every action, every movement, every act of violence with these young people is communication. And weapons are huge symbols of communication.

“People who have been traumatised have had something pierce through their protective shield and overwhelm them emotionally. It’s quite symbolic, then, that they would then take a knife, which can be used to pierce someone else’s shield.

“Not everyone who is carrying a knife is necessarily doing so in order to stab someone. A lot of the time young people say it’s for protection. These knives aren’t necessarily there to damage, they’re there to communicate. They’re communicating with each other – ‘I have the bigger knife, I can do this kind of damage’ – but they’re also communicating with us.”

What strategies do you advocate for reducing violence?



“First and foremost is participation and getting young people involved, and not in a tokenistic type of way. It’s also changing the models away from punitive minimum terms, five-year sentences for carrying knives, and actually looking at how. Many times we are looking at young people who have experienced horrific things.

“From a Project 507 perspective, we look at how we can combine more therapeutic models, such as talking therapy, with generic youth work. This is also about how we invest in the frontline staff and give them the space to reflect on what they believe the young people are communicating, whether verbally or non-verbally.

“If you give frontline staff the skills and the tools to look at a situation and be able to contextually analyse it, then they’re in a better position to go and deal with each young person individually.

“It’s usually frontline staff who receive the least investment. These are people that have often been through similar circumstances to those they work with, who have the heart and the passion to give back to their communities; but they’ve had no time to process all of their own stuff. It’s important to give them time to work through their issues as well as support them in their work with young people.”

Do you think we can solve the problem of youth violence once and for all?



“Do you think we can solve the problem of violence in the world once and for all? Because that’s how we solve youth violence. Youth violence isn’t an entity within its own right. Youth violence is violence that happens within young people, it’s no different from the violence that happens with the rest of us.”