Joyce McMillan: We must ask why knife crime has been allowed to dominate our fears

IT SEEMS like a while ago now, given the hectic pace of the 21st-century news agenda, but some of you may recall that at the beginning of this week, the UK was caught up in what seemed like a massive crisis over teenage knife crime.

It wasn't only that the incidence of knife crime had risen sharply in some urban areas, although the year-on-year rise across England and Wales as a whole was small. It was that politicians were being given to understand – by elements of the media, a...