My research aims to understand how knife carrying/crime spreads in England among young people aged 10 to 25 years, to investigate urban and rural vulnerabilities, to generate a new conceptual framing of the debate around knife carrying/crime with a view to developing strategies to address it. I am looking to utilise a public health approach that has been successfully employed in the US and Scotland as a method of violence prevention because it aims to provide the maximum benefit and impact for the largest number of people, it focuses on health and wellbeing of entire populations by drawing on a multi-disciplinary science base. I intend to use a mixed methods approach including social network analysis to identify if/how knife carrying/crime spreads through communities of youth.