While it is welcome that police chiefs are waking up to the need for a public health approach to knife crime (Teach five-year-olds the dangers of knife crime, warns police chief, 17 January), it is not clear that they understand what this actually means. For 18 years, the Race Equality Foundation’s Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities programme has been supporting poorly served parents to help their children develop high self-esteem, social competence and self-discipline. Evidence shows that children and young people who possess these qualities are better able to identify risky situations, as well as take action that is going to make them safe. These are fundamental behaviours and strategies if children and young people are going to decide that carrying knives, joining gangs or using violence does not make them safer, but puts them at greater risk.

However, we regularly echo the World Health Organisation when we argue that this type of support to families has to be accompanied by homes that are warm and secure, schools that provide high-quality education, law enforcement that protects all, a social security system that provides a strong safety net, and meaningful jobs. If we are serious about tackling the carrying of knives, we have to be serious about investing in the environment that will help children and young people.

Jabeer Butt

Acting chief executive, Race Equality Foundation

• Surely the most likely outcome of teaching five-year-olds about knife crime would be simply to increase the children’s fear that other people are carrying knives. Their most obvious course of action? To carry knives themselves. Just a thought…

Ed Barrett

Bebington, Wirral

• The police are wise to treat knife crime involving schoolchildren as a public health issue. Experience over time, eg in Ireland, has shown that jailing more adolescents does not prevent offending later on in life. Dev Maitra (Does the answer to Britain’s rise in teenage killings lie in Hong Kong?, theguardian.com, 17 January) is also right that “gun and knife crime are not inevitable”, although it is leaving it a bit late, attempting to intervene with gang members at age 17. More than one risk factor for teenagers to carry weapons has been identified.

The most powerful predictor is experience of bullying or victimisation around the age of eight or nine. Bullying can make a child feel unsafe at all times and subsequently, as a teenager, carrying a knife makes them feel more safe. Safer primary schools, with effective anti-bullying policies and cultures that do not breed hate and victimisation, are the best investment to prevent stabbings by frightened, angry youths.

Woody Caan

Professorial Fellow, Royal Society for Public Health

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