Memorandum submitted by Mothers Against
Murder and Aggression MAMAA
We concentrate on working in Wales with children
in school. Our presentations are about the dangers and consequences
of carrying and using weapons, backed up with graphic images of
knife and gun wounds. We are having great feedback from all the
young people in schools and youth centres and from the teachers
and youth leaders.
We do an evaluation form at the end of the session,
one of the questions is "What do you think is the biggest
cause of knife crime and why do you think young people carry a
knife?"
More and more the answer is "the media".
On discussing this issue the children tell us that they see so
much in the news about knife crime and the way it is portrayed
it gives a message that all teenagers are thugs and are armed.
They know this is not true about the areas of Wales that they
live in but it still frightens them. Almost everyone who has carried
a knife or knows someone who does feels they have to protect themselves
because everyone else is doing the same—This is how the
media make them think.
We do not have a huge knife problem here like
the big cities and towns but it is a problem if only one person
gets stabbed. This will only increase unless the media start taking
a different approach. One stabbing in a small community has an
impact and this is a problem and needs to be prevented from growing.
We recently did a presentation to a youth group
in Holyhead, when the date was fixed none of the young people
knew anyone who had been stabbed. When we arrived two weeks later
one of their friends had been stabbed at a party in Holyhead the
previous weekend and he also suffered severe defence wounds to
his hands. We met the young man a month later and he came to talk
about his experience at a knife crime seminar in Cardiff with
us this week. The effects on his life are many, including the
inability to now work on trawlers. He was due to start a few days
after his attack.
I join with others who are greatly concerned
about all aspects of violence, aggression, swearing and screaming
that appears on our screens constantly. Also the amount of images
and coverage that is given to joy riding, drunken behaviour and,
falling over and vomiting in the street. This also fuels the argument
that our young people are all badly behaved thugs. The knock on
of this is that everyone has a downer of teenagers. Their peers
are scared of them, so too are young children and the elderly.
These programmes showing the amount of drunkenness of our streets
glorifies what it happening and this cannot be good for anyone,
especially the emergency services that have to deal with it on
a daily basis.
I recently attended a Gospel concert at the
Methodist Central hall in Westminster. It was on from 9.00 pm
until 6.00 am and was organised by teenagers for teenagers. 2,000
young people attended what was a very moving and uplifting evening.
I addressed the audience, made up of teenagers who are sickened
by the violence on the streets. Over 300 of them had lost a friend
to street violence and the event was to get a message across that
they wanted to feel safe. Not one single member of the media turned
up to film the event or report on it. They focus far too much
on negative images and do not cover anything that gives a positive
message to the teenagers or those working with them.
Unless we do something very soon we are going
to have more and more teenagers carrying weapons in the belief
they are safer. We are trying very hard to get a message across
and all the time we take two steps back because of the way the
media portray our young people.
March 2009
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