I read this article that appeared yesterday.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2024/may/01/hainault-sword-attack-daniel-anjorin-met-police-london
And I am so sad that today is the 2nd May Election Day in London and that in The Guardian there is no mention of what happened in Hainault yesterday. A 14 year old boy died. His mother and father and siblings and school friends are devastated. Perhaps there is an article somewhere but I didn’t see it.
And as someone who has been working in a youth offending team, now known as a youth justice team, for twenty seven years, I feel sad and angry. Daniel was 14 and it looks like he was murdered by an adult. A 33 year old man was arrested for his murder. I wonder if there would have been more coverage if he had been murdered by another teenager?
I wonder are we numb to teenagers dying? Has it become normal? Is this the new normal for us Londoners to see sword fights in the streets? For me what happened is not senselessness. It is twenty years in the making.
It started off with a denial that knife crime actually was a problem in the early 2000s. This is what was happening in London anyway. Schools, local government, national government denied that it was something to worry about. London was not like New York or Los Angeles or Detroit it was said.
Yet my colleagues and I saw young people carrying knives more and more not using fists to fight but knives. Young people were then seen to be in gangs and then it became about the gangs. So many in power though did not see that what was happening with the rise of knife crime was a result of the war on youth waged by Blair in the late 1990s.
A whole generation was criminalised by the Labour government due to their policies to deal with crime. That is how I make sense of the violence on London streets. Although when Boris Johnson became Mayor of London his office Mayor’s office for the Prevention of Crime MOPAC funded social workers like me to be trained in trauma informed practice, and started to look at knife crime in a more nuanced way, the horse had already bolted.
We have been living in a knife crime epidemic for the last ten years and we are now seeing the problem of serious youth violence spreading across the country.
I feel sad that there has not been a nuanced discussion in the media amongst politicians during this Election campaign. I am not a Conservative Party Supporter. I used to be a Labour Party Supporter. As someone who works on the ground closely with children and young parents in the criminal justice system and those on the fringes of it who are referred to our team by police, I know the causes of knife crime and serious youth violence and violence are multiple. Problems are complex. A single solution never works. Multiple solutions work and labelling an incident as senselessness just makes others freeze and become impotent to solve the issue.
It shows the lack of sophistication of the politician or journalist who said something is senseless. It shows the lack of understanding of the politician or journalist when they cannot make sense of something.
I know mostly high performing LEADERS read my articles. As a high performing leader, I ask you isn’t it your responsibility to make sense of what is happening in your community. These days being online, that is my other hat running a side coaching business, I wonder does that result in us neglecting what is happening offline immediately around us? We have a responsibility to do whatever we can to come up with solutions as members of our community to knife crime and make our Communities safer.
We can only do this together.
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Taniya Hussain qualified as a Social Worker in 1991 from Coventry University in England, UK. She has been working on the front lines in London UK, consistently holding space for individuals and families in chaos and crisis for three decades especially, children and young people on the margins of society. Taniya studied Psycho-dynamic counselling from 1991 to 1993 at Goldsmiths College in London. Taniya met Sheikha Halima Krausen in 1992 and has been studying Islam with her ever since especially Mystical Islam, Tassawuf (Sufism) and walks on the Chisti path. Taniya fuses Jungian Pyschology and Islamic Psychology and this fusion can best be understood if you read her book Dancing with Darkness which is available on Amazon. It became a Best Seller on Amazon in the UK, U.S and France in April 2025. The book tells the story of Tamara Alvi, a fictional charachter and is a psychological thriller and a story of healing. Taniya started her coaching and consulting business in January 2018 and she works mainly with High Achievers and High Performers and High Performing Leaders, offering reflective spaces since 2018 and what she refers to as THE REFLECTIVE SPACE. Taniya since starting her busines discovered that she is a powerful healer and was shocked that clients were relieved from pain even though they have been diagnosed with a chronic illness. Taniya is delighted to have discovered Paceology, which is the detailed study of PACE. She is the first paceologist. She noticed when working with high performers when you slow down in one area of your life, this causes you to speed up in another area and vice cersa thus leading to increased levels of productivity, creativity, clarity and energy. She brands herself as the Muslim Alchemist because she really is The Muslim Alchemist as she guides you to transfom the base, in other words the shit that you have experienced into GOLD whether that is love of yourself or God or another human being or a healthier body or a life where you feel at peace and calm and fulfilled or more energy or more money. You definintely will feel lighter, more freer and more clearer even if you book one consultation with her or several sessions.
Taniya has a very holistic approach when working with individuals and works with you on multiple layers, the emotional, the psychological, the social, the physical, the mental and the spriritual. She uses stories from the Quran and the Bible when working with clients on a one to one basis or in group workshops as well as breathwork, body scanning, cognitive behavioural therapy, neuro linguistic programming, motivational interviewing. systems theory, neuro science. She is trained in multiple modalities as well as using her own Paceology and insists on offering her clients a trauma informed and trauma responsive service.
She is constantly integrating her knowledge of the Quran and Bible with her vast social work experience and training. Taniya's extensive ability of applying psycho-dynamic theory to organisational settings, teams and groups as well as to individuals results in those who attend her sessions or workshops as feeling lighter and more energised. Taniya uses skillfully her understanding of the Shadow, that Jung constantly talked about and her Mystical Training. She also has integrated her passion for inter-faith dialogue and the archetypes that Jung often refers to, come alive in her one to one sessions and her group workshops thus resulting in individuals feeling more freer and fulfilled after they stop working with her. Taniya just does not provide clarity she WAKES you up to. Taniya has a great skill in being able to see the blind spots in others and does this in a non judgemental way and a way that you feel safe. She also "untangles energetic knots" (a term she uses for Shadow) in your body to promote healing from mental and physical disease. Clients usually are healed in a short amount of time because she pinpoints the memory, the event, the thought that first caused the disease. She also provides one to one sessios or training workshops to social work teams, school, secure and prison estate on youth justice, knife crime prevention as well asidentification and prevention of early onset of burnout.
Taniya has three sons, who were born in 1996, 2001 and 200 and lives in Surrey, England and when she is not coaching or writing songs, blogs and poems, she loves to spend time, travelling, walking, listening to music, watching films or playing cricket.
She speaks fluent English and Urdu and basic German and French and is learning Arabic and Hebrew.
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