This paper reports on analysis from case files collated by the National Childhood Mortality Database (NCMD) on children in England and Wales who died through stabbing. 145 CYP who died of knife wounds and submitted to the NCMD between April 2019 and March 2024. A detailed analysis was undertaken of 57 eligible CYP where full NCMD records were available after the completion of the child death review process. The case file analysis that is focused on in this paper is particularly the experiences of violence prior to the fatal injury. The findings were that the fatal violence that the children experienced was often not the children’s first experience of violence victimisation. Contemporary policy thinking frames serious youth violence (SYV) as a distinct and separate issue to domestic violence and abuse (DVA). Analysis of the NCMD case files presents these forms of violence as more intertwined in the lives of children who die through stabbing; a substantial proportion have been both victims and perpetrators of diverse forms of violence before they died. Findings in this paper highlight the ways in which contemporary policy and intervention frameworks silo out violence in a way which creates a fractured intervention pathway which fails to prioritise childhood DVA. Our findings suggest there is a significant missed opportunity for early intervention at the point of childhood DVA experience which may reduce children’s risk of further violence victimisation and perpetration at a later stage.
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