Teesside knife crime campaigner to open new youth centre
It's hoped it'll prevent young people from 'going down the wrong path'
A Teesside knife crime campaigner is hoping a new centre will prevent young people from going 'down the wrong path'.
Theresa Cave is set to open a facility in Redcar to educate the youth by giving them positive ambitions after they finish school.
Her son Christopher was stabbed to death in 2003 in an unprovoked attack.
Theresa said: "We can do outside activities with the young people that we work. We can have two containers and put in a little gym in there where they can go and let some steam off in-between our programmes. It's going to be used literally for young people for Point 7, for anti knife crime projects and projects to bring communities together like kickboxing out on the green and pilates for the elderly.
"The thing is with these young kids now, they're already going into the park after dark and they're sitting having little fires, not damaging anything, but like kids do. But when they'll know we're there they'll have a time limit when they can come into the park, they won't have to break in, they don't have to climb over the fence and it's just a different avenue.
"All those programmes that we work with young people with shows them different avenues that they can go down, so we're changing mindsets by pointing them into the directions of the Prince's Trust, apprentices and college. We can bring people there to do little workshops with them to give them a taster sessions before they have to go into the 'big, wild thing' that they're frightened of that's 'uncool' for them, and they can see exactly what happens and we can do that on-site.
"It's definitely going to lower the level of anti-social behaviour in the park itself for a start hopefully. It's going to bring kids from surrounding areas together, it's going to give them a safe place to go where they can come and do art, MC, music and we can have open mic sessions outside at night time.
"We can do so many different things so we're giving the kids something that they want to do rather than them having to do things that the council says is there for them, and they don't want that so they're rebelling, so hopefully by this time next year we'll see a little bit of a difference."
Theresa set up The Chris Cave Foundation which supports and educates families and local communities affected by violent crimes.
The new youth centre will be based at Locke Park in Redcar.
Last week on a visit to Darlington, we spoke to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak about knife crime and he said: "It's absolutely awful whenever we read or hear about another young person being affected or losing their life to knife crime, which is why we're doing a range of things to clamp down on it. First and foremost, just putting more police officers on the street. Nationally, 20,000 more police officers.
"We've been toughening up sentencing for those in court who are caught carrying knives and associated crimes. We've seen the sentence for people involved in knife crime rise over the past few years, to act as a better deterrent and punishment, so taken together that's a strong set of interventions.
"Nationally the numbers have been coming down and obviously we want to do more. Alongside all of that work, it's important to keep investing in youth services and making sure that young people have safe places to go after school and on the weekends, where we can make sure they're exposed to good, positive environments and that's why we're investing more into youth centres across the country too.
"We're giving police the powers that they need to clamp down on knife crime that means the use of stop and search, the ability to confiscate knives and things like the ban on zombie knives or online retailers. All of those things together means that the police can do their job effectively."