SPECIAL REPORT: When Colin Waters' cousin was brutally stabbed to death 18 years ago his family was plunged into a nightmare. The mounting hysteria over knife crime on our streets sent Waters on a mission to understand why so many young people have a fascination with the blade, to chart the change in public reaction ... and to find solutions

To the day and the hour, I remember the first time I saw my father cry. 11.30pm, January 2, 1990. I was in bed and dad woke me up to tell me my cousin was dead. He had been murdered, stabbed by a former friend. I was 15, my cousin and his killer, both 16. I was half-asleep, as disturbed by my father's tears as I was by news I couldn't take in.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be. The 1990s, my teenage self had decided, were going to be special. Only weeks earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and there were signs - fulfilled 11 months later - that the Thatcher era was ending. Glasgow was freshly appointed the European City of Culture, a celebration of the arts and year-long re-branding meant to bury its "No Mean City" image. Two days gone though, and the 1990s were already tainted.

Commentators seeking to downplay the recent "epidemic" of knife crime cite precedent. They'll remind you of medieval apprentice boy riots, Johnnie Stark the Razor King, teddy boys, and football casuals. There was no precedent, however, in my hometown, a small former mining community about eight miles to the south of Edinburgh. The murder shocked residents. Kids fought, sure, but stabbings?

In the past year I've interviewed my cousin's friends and our relatives. Why did my cousin die? The killer's defence, denied to this day by my family, was that the enmity between him and my cousin was provoked by small-town gang rivalries. There was much talk at the time about soccer casuals, and what coverage there was of the trial in the Scottish media made some mention of this in their reporting. But what it boiled down to was a fall-out between two young men, boys really.

My cousin was a lively, popular boy. He was tall, handsome; girls liked him. He was into music and football. Clothes were important; he liked looking good. The majority of their mutual acquaintances sided with him, leaving his former friend isolated and smarting.

The current media profile of teen killers is of black teenagers from deprived areas. Their family lives are chaotic, they have little education. Such a profile does not fit my cousin's killer. He was not stupid. His background was lower middle class. His parents were church elders; one uncle was a police officer; another, a social worker. At his trial, witnesses testified that the killer had threatened to kill my cousin at least two weeks before he actually did kill him.

On the day of the murder, the killer drank half a bottle of wine and several cans of lager; alcohol is a contributory factor in almost half of all murders. That night my cousin was challenged to a fight. Unaware his opponent had a knife, my cousin agreed. Within moments of the fight beginning, my cousin was stabbed in the heart. His killer maintained in court that he'd been carrying the knife for "protection". According to a CCJS/Street Weapons Commission survey, 85% of young knife carriers give "protection" as their reason for carrying a weapon. It's false logic; research shows carrying a knife increases your chances of getting into a violent confrontation.

Despite the threats made to my cousin's life before his death, his killer testified in court that his death was accidental. The defence argued that, as the killer was only 16 at the time of the crime, "the consequences of being convicted of murder would be totally traumatic". The jury agreed. After a three-day trial, the jury took 20 minutes to find him guilty not of murder but of culpable homicide. He received a seven-year sentence.

"Totally traumatic" describes my family's experience of the verdict. We did not believe justice was served. In the past 18 years, we have got on with our lives, or tried to. But every time we read about another teenager killed by a peer, the events of 1990 flash before our eyes. Particularly over the past two years as the number of knife murders and assaults has developed a lengthening media profile.

For that reason, last autumn I began to research a book on knife crime. I wanted to know whether matters really are deteriorating, and, if so, why. For I believe that our attitude to young people has changed in the past 18 years. I believe that it has hardened.

My uncle is of the opinion that the jury made its decision on the basis of the killer's youth. He thinks that they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Two decades on, living in a Britain where the most notorious crimes of the past decade-and-a-half have been murders committed by teenagers using sharp instruments - Stephen Lawrence, Damilola Taylor, Jodi Jones, Ben Kinsella - I wonder if the jury would arrive at the same verdict today. My instinct is to doubt it.

As part of my research I've travelled the country - Glasgow, Middlesbrough, London - and spoken to police officers, academics and health professionals. I've interviewed victims and perpetrators of knife crime, who, in areas where gangs fight, are often the same person.

I have been surprised by the number of people unconnected with the project who, when I've mentioned what I'm working on, have volunteered stories of their own experience of knife crime, or that of a friend, son, partner.

In this period, I've watched as the topic has rapidly become a story to rival the economy and Iraq. The precedence it has taken was recently recognised by the Metropolitan Police when they made knife crime their top priority, replacing terrorism. But is knife crime actually increasing?

Statistics often obscure rather than confirm, here. In March of last year, at a House of Commons Home Affairs Committee on knife crime, the chair, John Denham, began by asking Vernon Croaker, a Home Office minister, to clarify statistics that are "sometimes confusing".

Croaker quoted figures published by the British Crime Survey, which is based on interviews with the public. In 2002-03 there were 953 homicides, of which 266 involved the use of a sharp instrument. In 2005-6 there were 746 homicides with the number involving sharp instruments falling to 212 homicides. However, Croaker went on to reference emergency hospital admissions.

"There is no doubt that such admissions as a result of assault by a sharp object have risen to 5961 in 2005 from 5281 in 2002 and 3500 in 2000. Therefore, there is some evidence of an increasing trend in the use and availability of knives."

There appears to be serious under-reporting of knife crime. A snapshot study of people with injuries attending an A&E department in Glasgow in 2004 found only approximately 30% of assaults were reported to the police.

This week the British Crime Survey (BCS) published new figures: 130,000 violent offences involved a knife last year, down 43,000 on the previous year. There are question marks over the BCS's statistics, however. For a start it excludes crime experienced by those under 16 years old, an increasingly significant category with regard to knife crime. It covers England and Wales only. Its figures are a national average; it's perfectly possible therefore for crime to appear to be going down while in fact it goes up in knife hot spots.

As Marian Fitzgerald, Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, has said: "The people who are most at risk of serious violent crime are young men in inner cities. For the last decade social surveys have found it difficult to get into these areas. As a result, the survey offered a more comforting picture to ministers about the extent of violence".

Without simply understood figures confirming what the real situation is, responses to statistics are inevitably partisan. The government, for example, quotes the BCS. Knife crime has itself become a political weapon, with both Labour and Conservative competing to sound hardest on knife crime.

Last Sunday Home Secretary Jacqui Smith outlined the government's Youth Crime Action Plan. Critics called it "half-baked". A proposal that teenagers caught in possession of a sharp object be made to visit knife victims in hospital was greeted with especial scorn. Smith replied by insisting her measures were "tougher" than those proposed by the opposition.

In fact restorative justice - where meetings are held between offenders and their victims - have helped some criminals to reform and some victims to recover from trauma. Given present levels of overcrowding in prisons, it's natural that the government would explore alternative methods of dealing with young offenders. But after the criticism Smith's Action Plan met, it will be a brave Home Office minister who suggests a measure that isn't recognisably punitive.

In a recent interview with The Times, the government's "knife tsar" Alf Hitchcock said he was worried about the way the issue is used politically. He wanted parties to pool ideas. He echoed conclusions I have reached during my research. The roots of knife crime are such that attempts to address them will take years, a generation even. In such circumstances, consensus is necessary. But there are votes in sounding tough on crime.

Ironically, there isn't that great a degree of difference between the government's and the opposition's knife crime plans. Gordon Brown's position is that people caught in possession of knives will face either prison or a high-end community punishment. David Cameron said that if you are stopped with a knife on you, you should expect to go to prison, a stance he describes as "clear" and "plain". But "expect" is not the same as "will". Question the Conservatives further and you discover what they actually mean is - offenders face either prison or a high-end community punishment.

The tabloids' response has been unequivocal: "Knives: why no part of Britain is safe" read Thursday's Daily Mail. That's not quite right, though neither is the counter-charge. Some, often liberals, deny knife crime is occurring to the extent that it is. They believe it's just another bout of press-led "moral hysteria". This week a Guardian columnist asked, why get so worked up about knife crime now? After all it's restricted to specific urban areas, and violence has always happened, particularly amongst the poor. Gang members are often curiously fatalistic about their fates ("It's my time"). I fear the rest of society is too.

My research suggests that if knife crime is to be tackled, it may require a package of measures that in certain lights look liberal, in others, conservative. Research tends to show that the earlier the authorities intervene in the lives of people thought vulnerable to becoming violent later in life, the better. When Tony Blair suggested profiling unborn children in problem areas, critics characterised this as a step toward the world of Minority Report. But after the age of three, children's ability to empathise and their attitude to violence is already psychologically and physiologically in place and difficult to change. On the other hand, there is a place for teaching young people the woolly-sounding but perhaps useful "parenting lessons" and "emotional education". And, yes, restorative justice. As Lord Victor Adebowale, chair of the London Youth Crime Prevention Board, said this week, "The solutions aren't either/or; they're and/and".

In several ways my cousin's death doesn't fit the public perception of knife crime. He wasn't black, he didn't live in a troubled inner city area, he had just got his first post-school job. Nor did he appear in a film like Robert Knox. He never had a trial with a football club like Kiyan Prince. He wasn't an altar boy like Jimmy Mizen. What he shares with them is a forced brotherhood born of an early death and a lingering series of what ifs'. Eighteen years on and these questions only keeping multiplying, breeding, like germs. Perhaps that's what they mean when they talk about a knife crime epidemic'.