Meet the stab victim taking knives off London streets...one lethal weapon at a time

Knife crime campaigner Faron Paul is showing a group of teenagers a huge scar on his neck, at the scene where 14-yearold Daniel Anjorin was killed with a sword as he left his house in east London this week.

- BARNEY DAVIS

“So what do you do if someone approaches you with a knife?” Mr Paul asks the young group after showing them his injury. One of them replies without hesitation: “I’m cutting, I’m out of there.”

The victim-turned-activist agrees, as he offers every teenager he runs into in Hainault the same advice: “Don’t let your pride let you die. Run and fucking live to fight another day, yeah?”

Mr Paul knows what he is talking about – he says he has been stabbed 18 times in two separate attacks. Now he runs FazAmnesty, a weapon amnesty charity, taking unwanted knives, axes, guns and swords off young people and delivering them to police with no questions asked.

Describing the worst of his two incidents – when he confronted someone who had assaulted his girlfriend and was stabbed in the neck with a large kitchen knife – he says: “I could feel the trickle of blood but I couldn’t see anything. I was bleeding out.

“It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done – not running. Physically, mentally and emotionally I had to rebuild – my mental space and my physical body. The damage was past just being stabbed. I had damage to my nerves, I had brachial plexus injuries and I had 40 per cent blood loss.

“It took a while to get rid of anger and revenge and feeling sorry for myself. But I turned it into my fire, my infinite petrol tank. I want to get back at knife crime – the whole thing, not this one individual. But it is hard to let go of revenge. Often, I sit there and wonder. If I was to go back in time and stab the person who stabbed me 15 years ago, would I be here now helping people?”