Eight-year-old child caught with knife
Children as young as eight have been caught carrying knives in the region according to new figures.
Dyfed-Powys Police dealt with an eight year old carrying a bladed article between 2012 and 2016, with South Wales Police seizing a pistol and a handgun from children at school in 2015 and 2017.
In West Mercia, 31 children under the age of 18 were found with a bladed article or knife in school between 2012 and 2016, with one child as young as nine.
Elsewhere in the county, a study has shown that 4,290 children had armed themselves with knives in 12 months up to last June, a figure up by nearly two thirds on 2013.
In one area of the UK a child as young as four was caught with a knife.
The figures come after DCS Sean Yates, Scotland Yard's head of knife crime said children should be educated on knife crime from the age of five.
He said: "If youngsters are going to go out and stab each other it is very difficult to police.
"We need to be talking to these youngsters at a very early age. Why wait until they are exposed to social media."
He added that the 'two-strikes' knife law, introduced in 2015, was not being implemented often enough by courts, weakening its deterrent effect.
He said: "It is not always enforced.
"The police are putting people before the court. Not in all cases are you seeing the two-strikes law implemented by the judiciary.
"What message does it send out? We need to have support from the judiciary.”
Elsewhere in Wales, the youngest children caught in possession of a knife in South Wales, north Wales, and Gwent force areas were 11.
South Wales Chief Constable Matt Jukes said there had also been a rise in young drug dealers coming on trains from London, sometimes armed with knives.
He added: "Now that's a relatively new phenomenon for us and what it's bringing with it is some of the background of further violence in those groups that we wouldn't have historically seen around our local drugs gangs."
