St Ignatius College pupil Jessica Mitchell on how rising crime is impacting the life chances of her generation

I was born at Chase Farm Hospital and grew up in Enfield until the age of eight when my mother moved to Hertfordshire, while my father remained in Enfield.

Through my teenage years, I began to notice the change in attitudes, education, culture and most importantly crime between the two places just half-an-hour away from each other.

Enfield is a lively town with pubs, shops, schools and restaurants but, sadly, it also has a shockingly high and increasing crime rate.

An Enfield Council report from 2022 reported that, in a year, drug offences had risen 8%, rape offences 6.6%, and knife offences with injury 4.8%.

As a teenager now living back in Enfield and attending a local school, I know that young people fear sexual assault when going on public transport or walking down alleyways. Teachers stand at the bus stops making sure that students get on their way home safely. Though this is comforting, it almost feels as though some of our social solidarity has been destroyed. Safety fears can also mean young people don’t go out to certain places such as bars, affecting businesses.

People who have trauma from crime may need counselling, while the victims of domestic abuse may need social services and more attention from the council, which moves attention away from fixing the cause to only fixing the consequences. This is not sufficient – we need to fix both.

If children grow up with crime, it becomes a normality to them. The idea of robbing a shop, dealing and doing drugs becomes profitable and fun, stabbing becomes justified, and the innocence of childhood is destroyed, as well as young people’s future.

Children will look at gangs as an alternative if they fail to see any future in doing the vital jobs that run our country, leading to anti-school subcultures, low grades and an inability to move up the social chain, also causing a strong class division.

Enfield’s crime rates contradict the morals and values that children learn in school. As a result, the outside world becomes alien to them, making them unconsciously vulnerable to gang culture and more in danger of being involved in crime.

Crime ruins our society and ruins the next generation’s chances of growing up the way previous ones did. It causes the breakdown of roles in society as the innocent fear the cruel, providing a hierarchy for destruction. We need to find a way of teaching young children in Enfield how to prevent and protect themselves from gangs and other crimes in hope for a better and brighter future.

It is vital that we keep our community safe.

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