South London band, Mr. Man and the Iller Sapiens, perform at the Enough! campaign launch at the Royal Festival Hall. October 23, 2008. Photograph by Samantha Pearson.
By Samantha Pearson
LONDON, Oct 24 (Docklands Wire) – Relatives of stabbed teenagers, youth groups, and a London MP called for an army of volunteers to help steer young people away from knife and gun crime, after a spate of fatal teen stabbings in South London.
The Enough! campaign, supported by over thirty youth groups across the Lewisham, Lambeth and Southwark, was launched at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday.
“It’s a call for an army of volunteers to help build up the existing really good organisations,” Simon Hughes, MP and campaign organiser, told Docklands Wire.
But Hughes said his first goal was to encourage the government to give them a share of the £80 million sitting in dormant UK bank accounts, which ministers have said they plan to seize and donate to charities.
The inspiration for the Enough! campaign came from conversations with family and friends of murdered Southwark schoolboy David Idowu who died from stab wounds in June, London’s nineteenth teenage knife victim this year.
“We can’t go on like this. We’ve got to say ‘enough!’,” said Hughes, who plans to spread the campaign to other boroughs in the next few months.
The launch which included live music and a talk by the best friend of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. “Things need to be done. It’s getting ridiculous now,” Dwayne Broom told the audience.
Richard Taylor, father of murdered Damilola Taylor, has joined the campaign and said in a press release: “I have suffered great personal loss and know the devastation that knives can do to young lives full of promise”.
Although knife-related crime in London has decreased, the number of teenagers stabbed to death has soared by 25 per cent compared with 2007.
Lewisham is under particular pressure to deal with violent attacks. In September, it recorded 59 cases of assaults with injury, the highest level of all the London boroughs and over twice that of Southwark or Lambeth.
