‘For teenage boys, London is a war zone’, says brother of man stabbed to death

For many young people in the UK, carrying a knife is, they say, a necessity. Not because they are violent but because they fear being the victims of violence.

Now an acclaimed new book is trying to shed light on the lives of the young people who live in a world engulfed by violence, one in which they feel powerless.

As the author Ciaran Thapar puts it, lives that are ‘Cut Short’ by knife crime. One of the people Ciaran worked with is Jhemar Jonas, a young man whose own life was irreversibly shaped by violence.