My son was mugged at knifepoint this week - should I blame rising inequality?

It’s a rite of passage, apparently. Being mugged when you are 16. With a knife? More and more frequently

Islington is a mixture of extreme wealth and extreme poverty (Micha Theiner)

It was a moment worthy of a Tarantino film. “You’re in the wrong place. At the wrong time,” whispered the young man in a tracksuit, standing over four teenage boys, sitting on a park bench in their school uniform. One of the boys was my 16-year-old son, Gabriel. “Put your heads down, and don’t look up,” said the young man. In his hand, a 10-inch, serrated and curved blade.

“Oh, he would never have stabbed us, Mumsie,” Gabriel joshed, hours later. But his white face and nervous laughter belied how terrified he must have been, hanging out with his friends in Highbury Fields after a game of football only to be mugged at knifepoint.

They all looked down, obeying him mutely. “What school do you go to?” They murmured a name. Was it the right one? It must have been. “Give me your money.” Each boy fumbled in his pocket, handing over pitiful amounts of cash. Gabriel was so freaked out he even gave up his house keys. “It’s your lucky day,” sneered his tormentor, tossing them back to him. “Now go,” he ordered, continuing the movie script. They scurried off. “And never come back,” he shouted after them.

Are you kidding? Half an hour later, after Gabriel had come home and confessed what had happened, I was seriously considering, if not actually moving, then at least ensuring he travels in a taxi at all times. That was after I had yelled at him for being in a park in the dark. And hugged him, and cried quite a lot. Because the fact is that around here, children do get stabbed – fatally – for little more than a couple of tenners.

Fifty yards from our house is a piteous shrine to 14-year-old Alan Cartwright who was pushed off his bicycle and murdered by another child, with a single stab to the heart. He collapsed and died beside the Cally Pool, where his photograph still hangs. We walk past it every day, although of course it’s not until your own child is threatened that you ever think about it properly. Murdered for a bicycle.

The police told us Islington is the number one place in the country for casual “snatch” crimes; the mobile phone, the money, the bike. Not because it has a high density of residents, or a couple of big train stations. It is because it is a place where extreme wealth and miserable poverty co-exist in sharp proximity and deepening severity. Thirty-four per cent of children in Islington live below the poverty line. So while half the children here do ballet, watch puppet shows and eat pizzas at the latest Locatelli pop-up, nearly half cannot afford to live properly.

Helping out at a local Brownie pack, I can see this clearly; a child once confessed she couldn’t come camping because her parents were unable to stretch to a sleeping bag (we gave her one).

Islington has the second-highest level of childhood poverty in England, and the fourth-highest in the UK. It also has some pretty punchy house prices; the average house in Islington is worth £1.5m.

The young man who left his home with a knife in order to go and get some money from four schoolboys may well have walked past “one of Highbury’s finest houses”, an eight-bedroom mansion, currently on the market with Knight Frank for £6.5m.

It’s a rite of passage, apparently. Being mugged when you are 16. With a knife? More and more frequently. Do you respond by a) moving to a gated community and never allowing your children to stray beyond the door of an Uber? b) trying to halt the increasing polarisation between those who have money and those who have knives? or c) neither, because you don’t like gated communities and you have no idea how to achieve a fairer society?