DAVID LEASK and DECLAN HARTE

Hard as he tries, Liam just can't stretch his arms wide enough. "I was running around with a sword like this," he says, straining to the tips of his fingers. "I've fought with knives too, and hatchets and air pistols." Then he adds, matter-of-factly: "I've stabbed somebody."

The 18-year-old knows all about knives; loves them, in fact. He just doesn't want to fight any more. He wants a job instead.

Liam - his name is made up, his story true - should get his wish soon. Come next Monday he and half a dozen other lads will begin employment placements thanks to children's charity NCH. Three out of four of them will come out with a full-time career. Liam, a former gangfighter from Glasgow, doesn't believe it, but he has discovered one of the real fixes for knife crime: work.

"It's never going to be sorted," he said when asked for his solutions to knife crime. "There's nothing the matter with knives.

"Personally, I love them; I think they're great. I like cutting down trees, carving wood; I love that kind of stuff.

"It's not the knives, it's the people."

NCH is more positive. People, after all, change. Liam has. Just five weeks into a nine-month stint of training and paid work organised by the charity's Youthbuild scheme, Liam, who admits trying everything bar "smack", feels a different man.

"Everything about my life is going up instead of down. Since coming to the programme I haven't touched drugs."

The charity wanted to know why young men like Liam carry knives - or even guns. So they asked. Some 800 youngsters took part in a special poll, many of them young men and women taking part in NCH programmes across the UK and a quarter of them from Scotland. The results will be published today.

Just less than two-thirds said the main reason young people carried weapons was to protect themselves. Nearly as many stressed the importance of revenge and reprisals.

Nearly half, 45%, said they never felt safe. One in five said they sometimes or often sensed they were in danger.

The findings were not scientific; the sample was self-referring. But Liam and his fellow Youthbuild trainees believed they were accurate results.

Thomas Bridges used to carry, especially after a friend was badly hurt in a gang-related incident on Glasgow's south side. As a schoolboy, he thought his knife made him safer. Now 18, he's changed his mind. "The whole thing is senseless, pointless. I carried a knife but I never used it. You would end up getting hurt or hurting someone else, and that's you branded for life. You go down that slippery slope. I am not screwing my life up."

Thomas is on a bit of a high, the good kind. He's got a real chance of a job, and a wage packet in his back pocket. NCH has been running the Bridgeton-based Youthbuild scheme for the past 18 months, turning two squads of raw recruits, most with a background in offending, into real prospects for Glasgow's booming construction industry. Around 75% of the scheme's graduates go on to full-time employment.

Manager Tony Scally has watched young men - and the odd young woman - grow in confidence and self-esteem with every penny they earn. "See, when they get the money in their pockets," he said, "they don't need to hang around corners, say a 100 yards from another group looking for a fight. It's some difference."

Experts are pretty sure schemes getting young men into meaningful jobs - and training, in life skills as much as in trades - are crucial in the war on violent crime, and not just because the cash they earn keeps them away from trouble spots.

Jobs break down territorial divisions (the lads at Youthbuild, for example, come from a whole variety of effectively warring Glasgow schemes) and give young men something to lose if they do get into bother.

Karyn McCluskey is deputy head of the Violence Reduction Unit, the police-led body spearheading the Safer Scotland campaign.

She said: "Work is by far one of best things there is for keeping people on the straight and narrow.

"One in six households in Glasgow is wholly unemployed, so there are young men who will have grown up seeing maybe two or even three generations of unemployment and view that as the norm.

"Some of them will also be growing up in communities where gang violence is an everyday occurrence and this becomes their outlet - territorialism limits their ability to get a job as they are likely to be attacked if they leave their area, so having no job through which to achieve success, respect and status, they seek to achieve it through gang activity and casual violence instead."

NCH in its poll also asked for some other solutions to knife crime. Proposals from young people included giving them a bigger say in community planning and local democracy. They wouldn't have to go far from Youthbuild's base in Glasgow's east end to find good examples.

Another charity, Save the Children, has brought youngsters together from across the most deprived neighbourhoods of the city to lobby politicians, boosting the confidence and self-respect of their clients in the process.

Andrew Girvan, director of children's services for NCH Scotland, said the views of the 800 who took part in the poll were worth hearing.

"These are young people who have real detailed knowledge about knife and gun culture; teenagers who know someone who has been stabbed and many young people who don't feel safe in their own neighbourhood. The overriding message is that they are telling us to listen.

"We need to stop generalising and labelling young people as the problem.

"Young people are as much the victims as the perpetrators of violent crime and they want safe communities, just as we all do.

"The consultation has produced positive suggestions from young people about how we can all act to solve this problem. We will be communicating their views to the Scottish Government."

Some of the young people at Youthbuild yesterday came up with some simpler measures: tougher sentences.

One 16-year-old said: "There's nothing we can do. I've heard of boys caught with knives that are just getting community service. The sentences need to be tougher, say three years in the jail if you are caught with a knife."

Most who get involved in gangfighting are already serving their own life sentences: their enemies have long memories. Liam, for example, fears old grudges. "I know that my past will creep up on me one day," he said.

"But I think that if you have no enemies then you've never stood up for anything in your life."