A nation of knives

16 year old Marshall with his Mum Jodie Harman. Photo / Graeme Brown

When Feilding mother-of-three Jodie Harman's phone rang at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon last month she had no reason to feel alarmed. The supermarket check-out operator had stayed home from work unwell and thought it could be a friend calling to ask if she felt better.

Instead, she found herself urgently summoned to a nearby street where her 16-year-old son Marshall was lying on the pavement bleeding heavily - an artery in his thigh severed by a knife allegedly wielded by a 14-year-old boy.

"Marshall was trying to play it down, saying he was fine," says Jodie, 39. "But at the hospital we found he had one stab wound that was 15- 20cmdeep and two others of 3cm and 5cm deep."

The other boy is accused of stabbing Jodie's son three times after they had argued on the street. Marshall was in hospital for four days, and is still recovering.

"As a parent you worry about drugs and cars. You don't expect kids to be stabbed on the street-by another kid."

The boy who allegedly attacked Marshall is in juvenile detention, pending trial. Police are treating the case very seriously and have opposed bail applications.

But Jodie says the experience has shaken her deeply. "Every time my kids leave the house now I feel sick," she says. "I worry about whether they're going to come home safely. I never felt like this before."

Shashikant Prema, the owner of a West Auckland dairy, knows how she feels. His life changed utterly three years ago when a 17- year-old boy from a family down the street stabbed him five times in the neck over a $4.50 bag of chips. "I thought the boy was joking at first," says Prema, a 54-year-old father of three grown up sons, who had run the dairy for the past 27 years.

"I said, 'Don't do that.' But he was serious. Three years and several operations later I still have no feeling in my left arm. I can't play sport with the kids. My wife runs the dairy mostly alone. My life hasn't just changed. It's been ruined."

Every week, it seems, there is news of another stabbing, and the attackers appear to be getting younger. Last weekend, a machete-wielding gang of four teenagers, including a girl, allegedly robbed nine people in six locations across Auckland. The week before, there were reports of a frenzied knife attack on a Christchurch couple by a 20-year-old man armed with a 10cm blade who had been trying to steal their potted plant. And that same week a woman was stabbed during an attempted bag snatch near Hamilton Lake by a 17-year-old girl, one of what police say was a gang of three women.

New Zealand is a long way behind Britain, where one person is stabbed to death every day-and-a-half and a knife incident takes place every 20 minutes.

But violent offences involving stabbing or cutting weapons have risen an average 3 per cent a year from 2000 to 2009 - or around 34 per cent in the past decade. A Ministry of Justice report last year found that police apprehensions for possession of an offensive weapon (of which knives make up some 20 per cent) had almost doubled between 1999 and 2008, from1761 to 3006.

Disturbingly, the biggest increase was among teenagers: in 1999, 229 people between 14 and 16 were arrested for possession of an offensive weapon; in 2008 it was 478. In the 17- 20 age group, over the same period, the increase was almost as dramatic. Schools are now working with police to teach children about the danger of carrying knives and the Ministry of Education is developing a programme to allow teachers and principals to "search and seize" knives and other weapons from students.

At the same time, the Ministry of Justice is liaising with the Retailers Association to develop a voluntary accord on the sale of knives and the Fresh Start youth justice programme is developing a tougher approach to juvenile offending, including knife crime. The Youth Court will get new powers to order long-term mentoring and drug and alcohol programmes, and to impose tougher sentences. And this week, the Crimes Amendment Bill (No 2) was introduced to Parliament, increasing the maximum penalty for possession of an offensive weapon from two years to three.
The new measures reflect those taken in Britain where the Government doubled (from two to four years) the maximum sentence for carrying a knife in public and raised the legal purchase age from 16 to 18. Police have also increased the use of stop-and- search powers, partnerships with schools to educate children about the dangers of knives and provided more funding to community groups to tackle knife crime.

But are such measures more about reassuring the public that politicians are taking the problem seriously?

John Fryer, owner of the House of Knives stores, said most responsible retailers already refused to sell to children. "We have an unwritten policy that we don't sell to kids unless they're accompanied by a responsible senior, and we have had no problem," he says.

"The trouble is that knives are so accessible. You don't have to buy them. And the internet is full of stuff that you can order undetected.

"The answer, I believe, is education, [having] kids taught from the cradle about the responsible use of knives - not people trying to change the habits of a few 14- or 15-year-olds."

Ross Grantham, relieving national manager of the police's Criminal Investigations Group, says this country is a long way from facing a knife-crime crisis, though he concedes that knives "remain a matter of concern". "It's not out of control," he says.

"It's not rampant. We are concerned, which is why we welcome the Ministry of Justice's initiatives. But the reality for the average person is that knife crime is still relatively small.

"We are particularly keen on the education measures. We feel that if we can stop kids carrying knives we will be stopping it at its source. We're also keen for families to give their young people the message that knives are dangerous. Carrying one can appear to be cool but it opens you up to an enormous amount of risk."

But are the figures just the tip of the iceberg? Some knife attacks, or threats of attack, go unreported. Brian Johns, 71, a retired banker and insurance agent, did not call the police when he and his partner Monica were threatened on a bus one evening as they travelled from Newmarket to the Viaduct where they had planned to enjoy a quiet drink.

Johns had noticed a dishevelled man at the bus stop but did not pay him further attention until he pulled out a
20cm blade and threatened the couple as he got off the bus a few stops later. "The bus was about a third full and we were sitting at the back," Johns says.

"But as the man prepared to get off the bus he spun round, looked at me and brandished this knife. He said: 'Don't f*** with me, I know where you live'." As the man got out of the bus, he was still looking back at the couple. Monica screamed out to the driver, "close the doors, close the doors, he's got a knife!"

Johns didn't report the incident to police, because nobody was injured. "But we were really very shaken by it. Before that incident I used to speak out to people if they were behaving badly. But since then, I decided
it's more important that I live to die in my own time rather than with the help of others."

Passengers have pulled knives on taxi drivers, too. Tim Reddish, NZ Taxi Federation executive director, says there have been two murdered in the past couple of years, and others injured.

"In these frenzied attacks we suspect P might have been involved," he says. "Anything the Government can do to deter people from carrying knives must be a good thing."

For Patrick Walsh, president of the Secondary Principals' Association, the new powers in schools can't come quickly enough.

"There seems to be a steady rise in the numbers of teenagers carrying weapons that [police] apprehend on the streets," he says. "And we are concerned that some of those students are bringing those weapons into the school environment. They argue that they need them for protection, that in some areas it's unsafe walking to and from school.

"We don't want to go down the track of having metal detectors at schools," he says. "But we are concerned."

In 2009, secondary student Tae Won Chung stabbed Avondale College teacher Dave Warren in the back while he was standing at the whiteboard.

Then last year, a 13-year-old did the same to maths teacher Steve Hose at Te Puke High School.

The same week, Hamilton Girls' High School had to go into lock down when a student threatened her classmates with a knife.

Walsh believes the courts take too light an approach to young offenders.

"The worst that seems to happen is that they have a curfew imposed on them. Often they come from a dysfunctional family and the family's been the cause of the problem - then they're asked to be the solution. The message they get is that they can act up with impunity.

"Unfortunately you're getting some very hard-core criminals under 16.

They know about Section 14 on unreasonable search and seizure and they'll quote it to you. I think we should have a bill of responsibilities."

One of the problems is that knives are as close as a kitchen drawer. Mix easy access with drugs or alcohol, and an argument can easily escalate to an assault, or worse. Shashikant Prema, the dairy owner attacked by a teenager, believes young people need to be taught "the basic difference between right and wrong".

"If the Government is introducing education measures and tougher sentencing that's good. It's a start. But parents have to take responsibility, too."

For Jodie Harman, the hardest lesson was seeing how her 6-year-old son, Lachlan, reacted to the attack on his older brother.

"We have always brought the kids up that hitting and violence is bad," she says. "But after the attack on Marshall,
kids in the area couldn't stop talking about it and made Marshall out to be a bit of a hero. Lachlan thought that was 'cool'.

"We had to tell him it wasn't. That it was terrible and really bad. But this is a good example of how young children can have their thinking affected so much by other people. And that's really scary."

-additional reporting Jane Phare.