Croydon lives up to its reputation - yet another teen stabbed.

Yet more blood on the streets of Croydon last weekend, our town's most recent top story feeding the persistent stigma that haunts the routes some outsiders fear to tread. Man dead, was the rumour circulating on Saturday, as police tape barred South Croydon High Street and headlines screamed the news of the latest teen stabbing. But Oliver Kingonzila was only a boy, the 26th youth to be killed this year in the London area alone, a figure which rivals the total of teen murders for the whole of 2007. How many more children are going to die at the hands of their peers before the year is out?
It seems wrong to list the event as just another statistic, yet such tragedies shockingly appear to have become the norm. How can the future generation seek to overcome this cynical acceptance while our current Government fails in producing the right number of fuctional members of society. To me, the familiarity of this sort of news grates sharply with the setting of this latest tragedy; as a Croydonian myself I found the locality unnerving. The question is, will it take every borough in London to cringe at close quarters for us to start appreciating the severity of the problem? It's a pity Downing Street isn't in the Hood.