Southport stabbings survivor reveals she hasn't used a kitchen knife since
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A yoga instructor who survived the Southport stabbings has revealed she has not used a kitchen knife since the attack.
Leanne Lucas said she was left so 'afraid in my own kitchen' by the ordeal of having to fight off Axel Rudakubana that she has not cooked since the summer.
As the anniversary of the atrocity approaches, she is calling for a ban on pointed kitchen knives to reduce the risk of them ever being used as a weapon.
Rudakubana was jailed for a minimum of 52 years in January for the murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, at the Taylor Swift-themed workshop in the town on July 29 last year.
The teenager also tried to kill eight other children, as well as class instructor Ms Lucas and businessman John Hayes.
'I live with my parents at the age of 36 because that's where I feel safe,' Ms Lucas told The Times.
'I'm hypervigilant and always looking for danger. It crosses my mind every minute of the day. It hadn't happened here in Southport before, so that's why I'm trying to get this message out: you don't know the next place it's going to happen.'
In the aftermath of the attack, Ms Lucas said she had read articles quoting actor Idris Elba and celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall discussing the potential benefits of blunt-tipped knives.
She said it was the sharp tip of the knife which nearly killed her, telling the BBC: 'When this idea about the blunt-tip knives came in I just thought 'this is a no-brainer, I don't understand why our kitchen isn't safer in the first place'.'
Ms Lucas is launching her campaign, Let's Be Blunt, during Knife Crime Awareness Week to encourage the use of rounded knives.
'You normally hear of the zombie knives, machetes, things like that,' she told Sky News.
'They sound dangerous but really, when you look at the figures, the highest figure is the domestic kitchen knife, which we have all got in our kitchen, which we use daily.
'Obviously, people can hurt people in many ways. It's about reducing that opportunity to cause life-damaging, life-threatening injuries that can take people's lives.'
There were around 50,000 offences involving a sharp instrument in the year ending March 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). More Trending
A sharp instrument was the most common method of homicide in England and Wales during the same period, accounting for 262 deaths. Kitchen knives were used in more than 100 of them.
'We need to all get on board as a member of the general public and say we're not OK with the increase in knife crime, and we want to play a tiny part towards preventing future knife crime, Ms Lucas told the BBC.
'I can't now 'unsee' what's in the kitchen, so I've got to do something about that. And I think that's the movement we're trying to create.''
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