Terre Baptiste has been checking her teenage son’s whereabouts compulsively since a 16-year-old boy was fatally stabbed two weeks ago in a park a mile away from their home in the east of Bristol.
“It is very worrying,” says Baptiste, in her living room. “Bristol isn’t a perfect city. But there weren’t stabbings one after the other. It was few and far between. Now it is on our doorstep.”
Darrian Williams died after he was stabbed in the city’s Easton area on 14 February. Two 15-year-old boys have been charged with his murder. His death came two weeks after Max Dixon, 16, and Mason Rist, 15, were attacked with knives in south Bristol on 27 January. Four teenagers and a 44-year-old man have been charged with their murders.
This bloody three-week period has left parts of the West Country city shocked and uneasy, with the authorities desperately seeking to reassure jittery parents. Last week, Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, and the city’s police commander, Mark Runacres, felt the need to write to parents promising more police patrols and urging them to continue to send their children to school.
Baptiste’s 13-year-old son is still catching the bus to school but she is calling him even more than normal. She says losing a son or daughter is every parent’s worst fear: “No parents should have to bury their child.”
This outbreak of violence has not come out of nowhere. There was a 33% increase in knife violence on the city’s streets between 2022 and 2023, with the largest increase in east-central Bristol. While most of the offenders were over 26, there was also an increase in the number of offenders in the 14-17 age group. There had been four stabbings of teenagers in February before Darrian was killed.
To counteract this rise in violence, some parents are demanding the return of youth centres to provide free activities, safe spaces and support all week round. Most of the council youth centres closed down, or stopped providing regular services, after funding was cut and the buildings transferred to community organisations in 2013. Baptiste’s friend, Samira Musse, who has two sons, says there are now no youth centres in the Barton Hill area. “What do you expect when you don’t have youth services? When the children don’t have anything to do? It leads to knife crime, grooming, exploitation, and drug dealing.”
Musse co-founded a youth club in the area in 2017. It relies on charitable donations and does not have its own premises or facilities. But Musse and Baptiste do their best to keep young people occupied. “I run a football club for children,” says Musse. “I have no funding but I don’t want to stop it because if they are not on the playing field, they will be on the streets.” In the south of the city, residents have stepped up their campaign to reopen a council youth centre near where two boys were stabbed. A petition has attracted more than 400 signatures.
Last year the council announced further cuts, with providers warning they will not be able to provide one-to-one support for young people any more. While there will be a new youth hub in the south of the city, council documents acknowledge that reduced funding could affect the delivery of services elsewhere.
This comes at a time when youth violence across the country remains stubbornly high. The latest figures, released last month, show teenagers remain more than twice as likely to be fatally stabbed as 10 years ago.
The small, sodden patch of greenery where Darrian was stabbed is sandwiched between tower blocks and a traffic-clogged dual carriageway. Minutes away is a busy boxing gym, which he used to attend. Its charitable arm, Empire Fighting Chance, helps thousands of troubled young people every year. One of the gym’s coaches and mentors, Serena Wiebe, remembers Darrian. “I knew him as a little kid. He was very sweet,” she says, in between mentoring sessions. “I never thought this would happen. It’s quite mad.”
Darrian is the fourth young person referred to the gym to have died in two years. “Bristol is going through an unpleasant period but you see the same problems anywhere in the country,” says the co-founder of the charity, Martin Bisp. “We’ve seen eight years of austerity, two years of a pandemic and two years of a cost of living crisis. And it is really difficult for cut-back services to mop up this growing need.”
The building used by the gym is one of the former council-run youth centres. The charity offers boxing training coupled with mentoring sessions – and has a waiting list of four to five months. “We take in young people who are struggling in lots of ways,” says Bisp. “They may be involved in antisocial behaviour. They can be involved in violence. Almost all of them have got some underlying complex issues which have not been addressed.”
The police carried out no-suspicion stop-and-search operations after the most recent stabbing. But figures released last week show officers failed to find any knives and disproportionately targeted people of colour during the 48 hours they used the powers. Another of the gym’s coaches, Courtney Young, says this blunt approach could be counterproductive.
“The police do need to check [for knives] but it can’t be suspicion-less. They can’t just do it willy-nilly,” says Young, who was repeatedly searched by the police when he was younger. “It will create a lot of anger.”
Despite the heightened awareness of parents and extra police patrols, there are fears the violence of recent weeks could continue. “The less help there is out there, the more we are going to see more young people carrying knives, getting stabbed and getting killed,” says Young. “The city needs to come together to stop this before it becomes a reality.”
