Bloody Ends

Project: Bloody Ends

Funding: £5,000 from Slough Youth Service and Positive Activities for Young People

Aim: To get young people to understand the dangers of knife crime and to talk about its implications.

- With violent crime rarely out of the headlines, Pinder Sagoo, senior youth worker at Slough Youth Service, thought it was time to speak to young people to get their views.

With the help of a production company, he worked with 12 young men aged between 13 and 19 to create a DVD educating young people about the dangers of carrying knives. The film showed a group of young people who get involved in a tit-for-tat stabbing and reveals the consequences of their actions.

The young people were involved in all aspects of making the DVD and even acted out the scenes. Sagoo says: "The young people were positive about the work - it wasn't a case of them not being interested. The difficulty was getting them to sit down and look at the execution of the idea."

Some of the young people involved in the programme had previously offended and a some were at risk of being excluded from school. But Sagoo says the experience made them aware of the way a knife crime could affect their lives.

Sagoo says his aim is to get the DVD shown in schools and to talk to young people in schools about the dangers of knife crime. "There's a lot of work going on in terms of adults talking about it but who is listening to the young people?" he asks.

"Hopefully we can get other young people in other areas to look at it and it will become a bigger thing where we can look at having some sort of conference for local authorities to listen to young people's views."