Bringing to life a creative collaboration with children and young people who decorated and embellished school shirts to express their thoughts and experiences of serious violence following a series of devastating knife crimes by and against children and young people, Lost Childhoods is the story of how a creative community action project fostered healing, community, communication, and awareness, and how it can be replicated elsewhere.

Documenting a participatory arts project developed in collaboration with local partners including youth work organisations, schools, colleges and alternative educational providers, the project invited over 150 children and young people aged 13–25 who have been directly or indirectly affected by serious violence to transform plain school shirts into deeply personal works of art. Aiming to offer a creative outlet for storytelling, memorialisation, and community-building during a time of heightened emotional impact, the result is a rich, sensory archive of youth voices that challenges dominant narratives around knife crime and instead centres the lived experiences of lost childhoods, resilience, and solidarity.

Lost Childhoods offers a new model for engaging children and young people in dialogue about violence; not through statistics or fear-based messaging, but through empathy, creativity, and collective expression. Shifting the focus from weapons to the human cost of violence, this book invites readers across academia, practice and policy to see, hear, and feel the stories that too often go unheard.