It seems to me we face a double-edged risk with knives today. There is the risk of being a victim of knife crime. But there is also the new risk of panicking about knife crime. The danger is that a panic will make the real problem worse.

After recent horrific murders, one newspaper declares that Britain is in the grip of “an epidemic of deadly youth violence”, London's new mayor talks of a “culture of stabbing”, the TV news suggests the UK is “the knife capital of the world” - and nobody wants to believe the Metropolitan Police claim of a 15 per cent drop in knife crime over the past two years.

We all know that even one tragic murder of a young person is one too many. However, in facing up to these emotive problems, let us try not to lose any sense of perspective.

First, there is nothing new about knife crime. It is always traumatic for those on the receiving end, but does not always make the front pages. When two drugged-up muggers put a knife to my neck I was so traumatised I ran home, got a table leg and dashed out looking for them to ask for my money back. That was back in 1981, when I was 21 and living in Moss Side, Manchester. Fortunately I haven't found them yet.

Secondly, as a senior police officer told The Times: “Statistically, knife crime remains a rare event” - and youth homicides remain very rare. Take London, where I live with my family. While the total of murders here has declined over the past five years, the number of teenagers killed in the city rose last year from 17 to 26. That was 26 too many, of course. But does it justify talk of an epidemic of deadly violence, or of a murder capital?

The fact is that Britain still has one of the world's lowest youth homicide rates. The authoritative World Report on Violence and Health, published in 2002, estimated a global average of 9.2 youth homicides for every 100,000 people aged 10 to 29. That average masks striking variations. Colombia topped the youth murder table with 84.4 killings per 100,000 young people, followed by El Salvador and Brazil. Across Africa the average was 17.6 youth homicides per 100,000, in Russia it was 18, in America 11. In the UK, there were 0.9 killings for every 100,000 young people.

We can argue endlessly about whether or not our streets are really less safe today. But there is no doubt we feel more insecure in our atomised communities. That is what raises the danger of serious concern about knife crime turning to panic. And if adult society transmits its sense of insecurity to young people, the only surprise is likely to be that more of them do not feel the misplaced need to carry some “protection”.

These terrible killings should never be belittled, but let us try to treat them as what they are: relatively rare individual crimes and tragedies, rather than symptoms of a social epidemic of violence. After all, fear and panic can be the most dangerous epidemic of all.

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