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The Mail's fight against knife crime is gathering momentum today as we travel around the country raising awareness.

Working in partnership with Kayleigh Pepper, whose brother Rich was stabbed to death in east Hull in 2015, and Humberside Police we are travelling to Oswestry in Shropshire to visit the giant Knife Angel sculpture.

The 26-foot-tall masterpiece is built entirely out of 100,000 donated knives collected from police forces across the country, including some from Hull, and is standing tall at the British Ironwork Centre.

Built out of morbid necessity to remember the victims fallen to increasing knife crime across the country, we will be engraving a part of the statue with our very own campaign message.

(Image: Jerome Ellerby)

Kayleigh, 32, said: "This will give us a fantastic insight into how bad knife crime is and see how many families have been affected.

"This campaign, I hope, will make our streets feel safer.

"My biggest hope is that I can save another family from going through the devastation we have in losing someone so dear in a violent knife attack."

Kayleigh plans to get every single secondary school in Hull to pledge to sign up to a new Humberside Police initiative, which will see her, alongside PC Christian Sewell and PCSO Richard Whelan, visit pupils across the city to talk about the real impact knife crime can have.

We will share our campaign pledge with the chairman of the British Ironwork Centre Clive Knowles.

Kayleigh said: "Myself, Lucy from the Hull Daily Mail and Christian and Richard will get to sit down with Clive and discuss our campaign with him and ask him any questions we may have.

"When the knife angel was originally created by Alfie Bradley it was not expected to be as big as it was so this is a fantastic opportunity for us to get our message out there on a very grand scale.

"We will also get to go into the workshop and engrave a personal message which I feel very honoured to do."

The latest alarming statistics show a rise in the number of knife crimes, not just here in Hull, but across the country.

There were 412 crimes involving knives between June and December 2017 in the Humberside Police area.

Four of these were attempted murders and three were murders.

Just in February alone there were three stabbings in the Orchard Park estate, one fatal.

Together we want to raise awareness of knife crime and find out why so many people are carrying knives.

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