A star with strong speeches
At 51, British actor and musician Idris Elba participated, Monday January 8, in the launch of the Don’t Stop Your Future campaign, aimed at fighting against knife crime which, each year, cause more victims, particularly teenagers, in the United Kingdom. The star, known for his roles in the HBO series The Wire or that of the BBC Luther, This is not his first engagement. In the early 2010s, the Briton, whose parents are of Sierra Leonean and Ghanaian origin, participated in a campaign against the Ebola virus. He also took a position for more ethnic diversity and for a feminization of cinema and television, declaring, in 2016 in the British Parliament: “Change is happening, but it is taking its time.”
An urgent fight against bladed weapons
Surrounded by relatives of victims, Idris Elba called, in front of the Palace of Westminster, to “a change of approach” of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, while “Every day parents’ feeling of helplessness increases.” Born in Hackney, in the north-east of London, a rather deprived area (but in the process of gentrification), the actor demands that “streets of the country are finally cleared” machetes and “zombie knives” (notched knives) very often used during crimes. He also calls for the creation in Parliament of a transpartisan working group to tackle the fight against this scourge: “These tragedies have been going on for too many years. The families’ words are not heard, I want to use my notoriety to change that. »
More and more young victims
According to the Office for National Statistics, twenty-one teenagers were killed in London in 2023, of whom eighteen were stabbed. This is more than in 2022 (14 minor victims) but less than in 2021 (30 teenage deaths). The latest tragedy took place on December 31 in Primrose Hill, in the center of the capital, when Harry Pitman, 16, was fatally stabbed after he joined friends to watch the St. Peter’s Day fireworks. Sylvester. Most attacks are perpetrated by other young people: on September 27, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Elianne Andam, was stabbed to death by a young boy in Croydon, to the south of the city. The phenomenon is not just London: in total, 282 people died after a knife attack, between March 2021 and March 2022 in England and Wales.
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