The work tackles the dangerous misconception that it’s possible to stab someone without risking their life

StreetDoctors has partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi to launch The Fatal Question, a powerful new campaign which spotlights a chilling misconception that is putting young lives at risk.

While knife crime has received widespread attention for many years, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed in 2025 that police-recorded offences involving knives or sharp objectives have increased by 81% over the past 10 years.

The campaign for StreetDoctors, a charity tackling knife crime by empowering and educating young people to make different choices, investigates the dangerous misconception among this demographic that someone can be stabbed without inflicting serious or fatal harm.

The Fatal Question campaign turns the question back to young people to find out what they really think. Teenagers from London schools were invited to engage with a life-sized, interactive human sculpture, pointing to areas of the body where they believed a stab wound would not be fatal – revealing the widespread misconceptions at the heart of the campaign.

Once a body part has been guessed, the statue emits a beam of light which triggers projections of the real-life stories of victims, accompanied by personal accounts from their loved ones, detailing the sobering stories of young people killed by a single stab wound to that area of the body.

The personal stories include high-profile cases such as 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, killed by a single stab to the thigh; Joshua Ribera, a Birmingham-based rapper killed by a single stab wound to his heart; and 12-year-old Ava White, who lost her life to a single stab wound in 2021.

The young people’s session with the statue has been captured in a three-minute film, directed by Jonathan Kneebone of The Glue Society, which will be broadcast across major cities across the UK this summer including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Glasgow.

StreetDoctors also hosted a series of workshops on the day with healthcare professionals, teaching young people life-saving first aid and how to deal with knife crime encounters. To continue bringing this vital education into the right spaces, the three minute film will form part of the charity’s ongoing education workshops in schools, prisons and local community groups.

To replicate the real life experience online, young people and educators can visit a dedicated interactive site to engage with an online version of the installation. It will be a destination for educators to search and find information on how to protect and educate children on the dangers of knife crime.