Celebrating the knife
This weekend in the French town of Nontron they are holding their annual - a celebration of the knife.
Knife lovers from all over Europe will descend on Périgord Vert to discuss blades with some of the world's finest cutlers.
Even in Sheffield where cutlery runs in the blood, it would be impossible to imagine such an event. The knife has become weaponised in Britain, stripped of all artistry and beauty.
As a Cub Scout in the 1960s I was given a knife by my parents to wear on my belt. It was one of the best presents I can remember; a bone handle with a long and razor-sharp blade housed in a tough leather sheath. It was certainly dangerous but it was also significant: a sign that my mum and dad considered me mature enough to be trusted with such a tool.
Were I to do the same for my son today, I would be regarded as irresponsible and he might be regarded as a criminal.
The now ubiquitous phrase "knife crime" suggests the problem lies with the implement rather than the user. The contents of my kitchen drawer has become an arsenal. Evil lurks in the cutlery tray.
A few weeks ago, at the height of the knife panic, Gordon Brown was filmed chatting to some urban youth at a project in South London. "What do you think about an amnesty for knives?", the Prime Minister asked.
The tall young man in his hoodie was quick to point out the policy flaw. "What's the point of that?" he asked. "You'd just go and get another one."
I am hopeful that as we enter what some call the "silly season" (but I prefer to think of as the sensible season), the sense that we are living through a widespread epidemic threatening our daily lives will be replaced by a belief that, while there are dangers in our society, the vast majority of us need not worry unduly.
I worry that the British media, including the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, must take some responsibility for a different epidemic - a phobia of street violence which diminishes people's quality of life.
The renowned criminologist Robert Reiner published some a few years ago which asked whether the media's depiction of crime had changed since the war. In quantity terms, he found very little difference. But the way criminal behaviour was described had altered significantly.
"The most marked trend in the reporting of crime over the half-century studied was the increasingly accentuated portrayal of crime as an all pervasive menace" he wrote in the journal Criminal Justice Matters, "threatening ordinary people...and in particular harming exceptionally vulnerable individuals."
"The style of reporting shifts markedly", he concluded, "from a degree zero description largely in legal terms only, to the vivid accounts of the fear and suffering of the victims with whom the reader is invited to identify."
He compared two stories from 1945 and 1989. The first from the Daily Mirror reported the trial of a "strip-tease dancer" and an American paratrooper for the murder of a hire-car driver.
"What is striking from the coverage", wrote Professor Reiner, "are a number of absences: no account of the details of the murder itself, of the injuries suffered by the victim, or any fear he might have experienced."
The more recent story comes from The Times and was headlined "Martial arts fanatic gets life for killing daughter aged five: Girl died from a combination of pain, shock and exhaustion after vengeful beating."
"The pictures portray a smiling child, a sullen and sinister looking man and a weeping woman", Professor Reiner noted. "The story graphically details the fear and suffering of the girl, and undermines any excuse of 'bad temper' offered on behalf of the accused. The story is clearly victim-centred and demonises the offender."
"Crime stories fifty years ago took for granted that crime was wrong independently of whether suffering was inflicted on sympathetic victims. The burden of the story was to make the perpetrator comprehensible."
Academics in the USA have long been documenting a similar phenomenon there. In her 1980 book, Crime News and the Public, Doris A. Graber noted: "The mass media supply a large amount of data about specific crimes. These data convey the impression that criminals threaten a legitimate social system and its institutions."
A 1998 report included this observation: "Disproportionate and superficial coverage fuels public fear and anxiety, which then can cause politicians to overreact and pass unnecessary and costly get-tough-on-crime laws."
In February 1999, an American Bar Association study on "Federalization of Criminal Law" criticised the US Congress for passing "misguided, unnecessary and harmful" anti-crime laws, for fear of appearing "soft on crime."
I feel as though we have been living through an identical experience a decade later. Crime has been falling for over 12 years and yet our law makers have passed more than 50 Acts of Parliament to deal with public concerns that it is getting worse.
Some of the legislation has been valuable, but there is scant evidence that all the new laws have contributed to making us safer. I suspect the constant focus on counteracting the crime menace has helped make us all more fearful.
Will we ever again have the confidence to put on a British festival of the knife or give a Cub Scout a bone-handled blade?
I'm 
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