AS LAW and order moved to centre stage in the election campaign yesterday and politicians cherry-picked statistics, the reality lay in intensive care in a South London hospital.

Abigail Witchalls, a young mother of 26, was critically ill last night after she was stabbed in the neck in front of her 21-month old son as they enjoyed a quiet walk in the spring sunshine.

Ms Witchalls, a part-time English language teacher, was on her way back to her in-laws’ home in the prosperous Surrey village of Little Bookham, pushing her son, Joseph, in a buggy.

She was approached by a man demanding money. When she refused he stabbed her in the neck and fled.

The attack appears to have been sudden, unprovoked and terrifying — the more so because that area of Surrey, according to statistics, is one of the safest in the country.

Conflicting crime statistics issued yesterday could offer no comfort to the victim, but merely served as a political football for party leaders to kick around in search of electoral advantage, with Tony Blair insisting that violent crime was falling, Michael Howard rejecting that there had been any fall in violent crime and Charles Kennedy saying that, whether up or down, there was still a vast amount of crime about.

Ms Witchalls is alive thanks only to a local resident who was alerted by her screams. He found her lying a pool of blood, unable to move her head apart from her eyes and mouth, watched by her petrified son. The neighbour wrapped a scarf around her neck to stem the bleeding while another called the emergency services.

Last night she was still in a critical condition on a ventilator at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, southwest London, with her husband Benoit, an engineer for BP, at her bedside.

The attack on Ms Witchalls comes as a vivid demonstration that victims of crime are not statistics but individuals.

According to police in England and Wales, violent crime jumped by 9 per cent in the final three months of last year, including a 10 per cent increase in gun offences.

The number of violent offences reached almost 300,000 in the last quarter, many fuelled by drunkenness, new sex crimes and changes to counting methods. Overall crimes fell by 5 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In the last three months of 2004 there were 11,000 serious violent offences, including murders and serious woundings, a 4 per cent increase on the same period the previous year. Ms Witchalls was attacked as she pushed her child through the spring sunshine on Wednesday. As she lay on the ground, Ms Witchalls managed to whisper a brief description of her attacker and said that he had driven up the footpath, a well-used walk leading to nearby woods, in a blue car.

Within minutes police and ambulancemen had arrived. She was taken to Epsom hospital before being transferred to St George’s, Tooting, where her mother, Sheila Hollins, the next President of the Royal College of Psychiatry, is head of psychiatry.

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