Knife crime and serious youth violence remain significant concerns for communities across the UK, with the impact extending far beyond the statistics.
According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), police recorded 53,047 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025. While this represents a 1% decrease compared with the previous year, the figures underline the continued importance of prevention, early intervention and helping young people understand the consequences of carrying a knife.
For children and young people, however, the issue is rarely as simple as knowing that carrying a knife is wrong.
Fear, peer pressure, exploitation and a perceived need for protection can all play a part in the decisions young people make. Social media and the digital world can add another layer of pressure, with threats, conflicts and anxieties no longer necessarily ending when a young person leaves school or returns home.
Understanding these experiences is an important part of helping professionals intervene effectively, and immersive technology can provide a powerful way to explore the pressures and circumstances behind a young person’s decisions.
When we began exploring knife crime and serious youth violence with professionals working directly with children and young people, one message came through clearly: we need to understand why a young person might pick up a knife in the first place.
Through conversations and collaboration with police officers, educational institutions, youth justice services, foster agencies, social care professionals and young people themselves, we heard about the fear and societal pressures that can sit behind knife carrying.
For some young people, carrying a knife can feel like protection. They may believe it makes them safer or gives them greater control in an environment where they otherwise feel vulnerable.
In reality, carrying a knife can expose a young person to further danger and potentially life-changing consequences.
That gap between how a young person perceives the risk and the reality of what could happen is something professionals need to be able to explore in a meaningful way.
It was these conversations that helped shape Cornerstone VR’s Knife Crime and Serious Youth Violence series.
Using immersive 360-degree virtual reality, the films allow viewers to experience events from a young person’s perspective and explore how situations can develop and escalate.
Rather than focusing solely on the moment a knife is carried or used, the films look at the experiences and decisions surrounding it.
The scenarios include being the victim of a robbery and threatened with a knife, interactions with the police including stop and search, being booked into custody and experiencing a custody cell, and a serious knife-related incident at a party.
Experiencing these situations through VR gives young people an opportunity to explore the potential consequences of decisions without having to experience those consequences in real life. For professionals, the films provide a way to see situations from a young person’s perspective and open up conversations that might otherwise be difficult to start.
From the beginning, it was important that the films reflected experiences and pressures that felt authentic to young people.
That’s why their development involved collaboration across policing, education, youth justice, foster care and social care, alongside input from children and young people who are, or could be, affected by knife crime.
Seema Moules, Child Exploitation and Missing Team Manager at Thurrock Council, explained why this was so important:
“It was important to create a resource that feels relevant to young people. These VR films capture the real pressures and risks of knife crime in a way that resonates.”
Linda Crawford, Head of Enfield Youth Justice Service, also highlighted the role immersive experiences can play in overcoming some of the barriers professionals encounter when discussing knife crime with young people:
“Addressing knife crime with young people means overcoming fear, distrust, and deeply ingrained norms. Cornerstone VR’s VR-enabled films are creating a powerful, interactive way to educate, engage, and equip young people and the adults around them with the tools to promote safer decisions.”
The power of VR isn’t simply in putting on a headset.
What matters is what happens around and after that experience: the conversations it prompts, the questions it raises and the opportunity it creates for young people and professionals to explore different choices.
The Knife Crime and Serious Youth Violence films have been designed to support a range of settings and approaches, including trauma-informed training, youth engagement programmes, family support sessions, preventative workshops, curriculum enrichment and professional training.
They can provide a starting point for conversations about fear, safety, peer pressure, exploitation and the consequences of carrying a weapon, while helping professionals explore these subjects from the young person’s perspective.
We’re also beginning to see the impact those conversations can have.
Following VR sessions, 75% of young participants said the experience had changed their perspective on knife carrying, while 83% said they felt deterred from carrying a knife. More than nine in ten (92%) said they felt more motivated to make safer choices for themselves.
All of the young people involved also reported that VR was more engaging than traditional learning and felt that the films should be shown to more young people.
There are encouraging signs in the latest national figures. ONS data shows that knife-enabled crime decreased slightly in the year ending March 2025, while knife or sharp instrument homicides also fell.
But tens of thousands of knife-enabled offences continue to be recorded, and behind every statistic are individuals, families and communities affected by serious violence.
Preventing knife crime therefore cannot be about one intervention alone.
Restricting access to dangerous weapons, policing, education and enforcement all have an important role to play. But so does understanding the circumstances that can lead a young person to believe carrying a knife is their safest option.
Our focus is on helping professionals, caregivers and young people explore that side of the issue.
Immersive technology creates a safe opportunity to experience difficult scenarios, consider their consequences and start meaningful conversations, helping us move beyond simply telling young people not to carry a knife.
It can help us understand what is driving the decision in the first place.
And that understanding can give professionals an opportunity to intervene before a young person reaches a point where one decision has life-changing consequences.