Just days after a Liverpool teenager was found guilty of stabbing a friend to death, Laura Davis reports on a new scheme to deter young people from carrying weapons

THE girl in the photograph looks so peaceful that it’s hard to imagine the chaos that surrounded her just moments before it was taken.

Militant doctors barking instructions as they raced to save her life and, before that, screams followed by the wail of ambulance sirens.

The teenagers looking at her picture are as still as she is, until one breaks the silence: “Is she dead?”

Yes, she is – the story of her life brought to an abrupt halt, at the age of 15, due to a series of bad decisions and a quarrel over a boy.

I am observing a Weapons Awareness workshop, which aims to reduce knife crime through education. It’s held in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, also home to the Anthony Walker Education Centre, named for the 18-year-old boy murdered with an ice axe in Huyton, in 2005.

Learning officers Joyce Parr and Mary Roberson hold these interactive sessions with groups of young people from schools, youth groups and other organisations.

Crucial to their success, they say, is that the children are able to talk freely, without the threat of recrimination – although they are forewarned that, if they refer to a crime, the police will be informed.

For this reason, outsiders are not allowed to sit in on an actual session. This one is being recreated by pupils of Halewood College, who have already been through the experience.

Even though they have heard the story before, they sit transfixed as Joyce describes how the teenager in the photograph took a boning knife from her father’s butcher’s shop, to warn off a group of girls who had previously attacked her in a row over a boy.

Cornered outside a nightclub, she pulled out the weapon, but instead of running away they grabbed it from her and she suffered a blow to the back of the head.

“This photograph was taken after her parents decided to turn her life support machine off,” explains Joyce. “They agreed to have these images used for education that would help make sure it would never happen to anyone else.”