The government has launched a series of hard-hitting adverts, featuring gruesome images of mutilated hands and knives sticking out of victims’ chests.

But even these fail to truly capture the real horror of what knives can do and the trauma it can cause. I know from first hand experience.

On July 23, 2000, I was returning home from a night out with a friend in Brixton in south London.

As were walking down a busy a street, a figure emerged from a side road with his arms in the air, wailing for help. At first we thought he was drunk, but as we got closer we could see he had blood on his hands and was in extreme distress.

“My friend has been stabbed”, he cried out through sobs.

About 20 yards on the side street, we could see his friend — outstretched wearing a T-shirt and shorts lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

I hailed down a passing taxi and told the occupants to call for help while my friend, a doctor, did his best to resuscitate the victim.

But it was far too late. The man died within minutes and I can still remember his last, gurgled breath.

He had received two wounds — one to his knee and the fatal one through his belly, with the layers of subcutaneous fat clearly on display. The knife had passed through his spleen, heart and lungs. He hadn’t stood a chance.

It is hard to describe the horror of the scene. The road underneath the young man’s body was dark and there was blood sprayed all over a nearby wall. His two friends, one of whom had also been stabbed, were drenched in blood and numbed with shock.

They could barely speak when a flustered police officer finally arrived.

And what had led to this? They weren’t members of a gang — in fact they were students from Canada who had come to Britain for their studies.

It transpired that one of the three friends had been mugged earlier in the night, the robbers taking his wallet with 60 pounds. When he went home and told his housemates, they went to try and get his wallet back, and confronted the robbers.

It was a decision that was to prove fatal for one of them.

The killer, another young man, was tracked down soon afterwards and given a life sentence for the murder. That moment of violence had ruined his life as well.

“We make games for the people that play them. We don’t make them for the Daily Mail.”

So says Dan Houser, the producer who co-created the Grand Theft Auto computer game series, one of the most successful of all time.

While sales have gone through the roof, the gangster game has attracted waves of criticism from newspapers, parents’ groups and politicians, including Hillary Clinton.

She says the series demeans women and contributes to a “silent epidemic” of sex and violence in the media that could harm children.

“They’re playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them. You know, that’s kind of hard to digest,” she said in a speech in 2005.

With the fourth instalment finally here, Houser is unrepentant about its trademark mix of fights, car-jacking and bad language and says computer games are unfairly singled out for criticism.

Violent TV shows like “The Sopranos” or films like “The Godfather” win handfuls of awards, while games with adult themes come under intense fire, he says.

“Most of it’s just Ludditism and people having a fear of things they don’t understand,” he said in an interview. “We see games as being an emergent art form…that will eventually supplant or challenge movies.”

Supporters say there is no established link between computer games and violent behaviour.

And anyway, games with adult content are given a rating which means shops can’t sell them to children.

Do you think there should be stricter controls on violent video games or is the focus on games rather than TV, films and the Internet unwarranted?

Two initiatives have focused the mind on badly behaved children this week and how to deal with them.

Under the first, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls proposes that trouble-makers as young as 10 should sign a good behaviour contract . The “most challenging” among them will have to stick to the order or risk a criminal record.

The second, more extreme, suggestion comes from Gary Pugh, forensic science director for the Metropolitan Police, who was quoted in The Observer as saying trouble makers as young as five should be recorded on the national DNA database because future offenders can be picked out an early age.

The idea has been widely criticised, both by those who dislike the idea of stigmatising children at such a young age and those who bemoan what they call the government’s obsession with compiling databases — and its embarrassing tendency to lose personal data. The government has been non-committal but says it is listening to all views.

Do you believe law enforcement authorities need more tools at their disposal to deal with unruly children?