Alexander Rose is a very impressive 19-year-old. Raised on a London housing estate, his campaign against gang violence recently won him an Anne Frank award for inspirational young people. Last week he participated in a Radio 4 discussion with the militantly middle-class Libby Purves and Jane Wellesley, the daughter of the eighth Duke of Wellington, who has just written a book about her family. With no disrespect to either woman, Rose was the most impressive person there.

He talked eloquently about the hardest decision he ever made: rejecting his mates at the age of 15. He knew to remain friends with these boys would lead him down a pointless dead end — and the word dead is not metaphorical in this context. His decision was vindicated in the worst possible way when a friend was stabbed to death. Rose then designed the STOP T-shirt logo, in which the T is shaped like a knife and the P a revolver. He sold his T-shirts on the street, then through eBay and is now campaiging on the internet through the Battlefront project.

Rose is just one of a number of black Britons speaking out against rising gang violence involving weapons. Shaun Bailey, a youth worker and Conservative candidate from Ladbroke Grove, set up the charity My Generation to encourage self-help. Ozwald Boetang, the sharpest tailor on Savile Row, is leading a drive to find professional black men to mentor young, often fatherless boys. Tim Campbell, the 2005 winner of The Apprentice, has already signed up. Along with articulate bereaved families, such as the parents of Damilola Taylor, they have made teen-on-teen violence a big story: something we care about. When a young person in London is killed, it makes the news, and so it should.

Compare this sense of urgency to Scottish complacency. Stabbings are so routine here, they often fail to make headlines and even fatalities struggle for our attention against the latest bloodless fight on the Holyrood benches. A World Health Organisation report in 2002 found the murder rate for teenagers and young adults here was five times higher than in England and Wales. Knife crime is three-and-a-half times higher and doubled in the last two decades. More than 100 people die in attacks each year.

The homicide statistics are just the tip of the blade. A far higher number of victims are maimed by injury: like Scott Breslin, paralysed from the neck down at the age of 17, when he was knifed by youths for straying into their area. It was probably demarcated by some litter-strewn footpath, chip shop or bus shelter, certainly nothing worth fighting for. But from such flaking street furniture do young men draw their pathetic sense of self. Scotland has an estimated 300 territorial gangs.

The authorities recognise the problem. Strathclyde police’s violence reduction unit is now a Scotland-wide initiative tackling an epidemic of brutality. The unit consulted neuroscientists whose work shows that neglect before the age of three damages part of the brain governing empathy. Courts have been given tough guidelines in sentencing offenders. The media does its bit with dramatic — but certainly not exaggerated — investigations into Scotland’s booze and blades addiction.

For all the official concern, there is little sense of national crisis outwith the communities most affected. Our response is top-down. In recent decades we have produced a number of people’s champions campaigning against hospital closures, bridge tolls, the detention of asylum-seeker children and other worthwhile issues. Celebrities oppose Trident missiles or new motorways on health grounds. Violence — with its accomplices drugs and alcohol — is our greatest public health problem. So where are the crowds reclaiming the streets?

Tackling violence requires dealing with issues of personal responsibility and that’s not a popular theme among firebrands. We like to pass the buck in Scotland — our problems are always the fault of the forces that impose on our lives: England, big business, corrupt politicians.

In England, gang violence has disproportionately affected black communities, where the debate has moved beyond blame to the need for self-esteem, good male role models and aspiration. Young black people still contend with racism but they can access an identity politics that transcends petty territorialism. Initiatives like Boetang’s will connect them with successful adults who have physically left the neighbourhood but retain a strong bond to it. For all the condemnation of rappers, music offers a means of expression that can be used for good and reinforces cultural confidence.

This is not to dismiss the problems facing young men in Brixton or Birmingham. But the 15-year-old in a grey Scottish housing scheme, patrolling his swing park in K-Swiss, has no identity beyond his mates. He is only represented in the media in court reports or comedy shows. His language, limited vocabulary and nasal delivery, are far removed from the confident , working-class Scots of a Billy Connolly or a even a Tommy Sheridan.

Who will mentor him from outside his community? Do middle-class fellow Scots feel the same responsibility to him as black professionals might towards his Brixton equivalent? An initiative like Boatang’s would be viewed with suspicion here, because it involves successful people telling children to reject their peers if it means a better life. That would be considered patronising and disloyal here.

Our failure to produce an Alexander Rose, speaking with passion and fluency, shows how fragmented Scottishness is. We have less confidence and coherence than cultures that have confronted far greater odds.

joan.mcalpine@sunday-times.co.uk.

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