06-07-2025
'When my son was murdered, knife crime was still a shock - now it's just part of the news'
It's been 11 years since Joshua Ribera was stabbed through the heart in a Birmingham nightclub. Back then in 2013, knife crime was still a huge shock, insists mum and vocal anti-knife crime campaigner Alison Cope.
"Now it's not a case of if, but when are you going to run the next headline? That's where we've come to. Now it's just part of the news."
Another week, another stabbing outside a college, another schoolboy bleeding out alone on the pavement.
Read more: Reality of Birmingham knife crime as 'kids kill kids' and children groomed into life of crime with 'trainers and fast cash'
Speaking from her Moseley home as part of our Deep Cuts investigation - which can be read in full below - Alison reflects on the relentless violence plaguing the city and the wider West Midlands.
Knife possession in the West Midlands has doubled since the pandemic, according to our stats, but it's fear that's driving more and more youngsters to carry weapons, Alison suggests.
Figures for the UK state it's around four per cent of people who carry knives - but depending on their age, schoolkids think it's more like 80 - 100 per cent.
"They think: 'There's all these scary people wearing Ballies, acting bad, I've seen a headline 'someone got stabbed on a bus', I'm just going to put a knife in my sock and pull it out if anyone tries to hurt me.'
"And then you end up with a situation that's so horrendous." For Alison, her son - a rapper widely known as Depzman -kissed her on the cheek and told her 'I love you'.
The next time she saw him he was dead - and she was identifying his body. She continues: "We're not seeing it getting any better at the moment.
"It's as if we're accepting the level of violence at the moment. I don't think we should ever accept it. We're not at war. It can never be ok and the ages, as we see, are getting younger - younger murderers, younger victims."
What's changed and why are we seeing such violence inflicted on our region's children? "What's shifted in the last six years or so is the social media element," she insists.
"You go to a school then, you'd explain it all and you'd be left with one or two kids who really needed to hear that message, now, 90 per cent do. It's really shifted now.
"The more they're exposed to, the harder it is to get the message across. My session has really stepped up and it's really to the point. It's really extreme.
"When I talk about losing Josh, I say even if there's a 1 per cent chance that what you put on your phone ultimately does make someone who does carry a knife want to come for you after school, come for you when they see you in the park, are you going to be ready for the consequence of lying on the floor bleeding out, thinking of your mum or dad's face as you pass away, are you really ready for that?
"Or there was a dad in Birmingham where a teenager had issues with a rival group, so if you're acting like the badman and causing trouble, and your parents clash outside school and you see your dad slashed across his jugular vein, who's fault is that, yours? So you can see them going 's***',
"Social media has got a huge role in all this."
"47 per cent of people being groomed are through Meta owned platforms, and some people are doing it through headsets, through gaming, through mobile phones and social media. When parents are made aware of that, they're absolutely gobsmacked.
"The problem is with phones if you're not aware is that you then see the level of sexual violence, stabbings without editing, totally inappropriate things, and we know that has an impact on the mindset of young people and they become totally desensitised.
"Every school you go to, it's getting harder and harder to get people to see this isn't acceptable. All of it plays a role in fuelling the negativity we're living in at the moment."
All the violence on social media and in films, games and more are all worsening the problem, slowly desensitising children to the violence. She added: "Squid Games, Top Boy, Supercell, so when you say, this behaviour is not ok?
"Don't film fights, don't run towards fights, don't all attack on the back of the bus, but they're still doing it, because we're not doing enough."
This piece forms part of our Deep Cuts project, our three-month investigation into knife crime in the West Midlands, which can be read in full here.
