Pastor Lorraine Jones from London lost her son Dwayne to a knife attack and now campaigns on the issue.
She’s been speaking to Premier after the fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney in an east London park on Friday night in what Jodie’s family branded a “totally random and unprovoked attack”.
On Saturday night, 17-year-old Yousef Ghaleb Makki was stabbed to death in Hale Barns, near Altrincham, in Greater Manchester.
Meanwhile an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches found the number of recorded offenders aged under 18 committing homicides using a knife or sharp instrument rose by 77% from 2016 to 2018, up from 26 to 46.
Calling for churches to respond, Pastor Lorraine said: “I mean, right now our communities have very limited community centres, so therefore there’s no safe spaces for young people to go to that they can engage with workers or even just be children.
“And I’m appealing now to churches to, if they can, start running a sort of community hub for kids because we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of kids that are just on the streets with nowhere to go after school.
“One of the things which I think would be really, really useful is if we could have on a weekly basis just open up our church halls and just have a social for the children.”
Theresa May has promised a cross-Government response to knife crime as she rejected claims police cuts had contributed…
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