By Daniel Lombard
The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has issued crime safety advice to men for the first time.
All the evidence shows that we need it.
One stark statistic, cited by the charity, is that three quarters of murder victims are male. Meanwhile the latest crime figures from the Home Office show that men are twice as likely as women to be the victim of violence.
Look at the 20 teenagers murdered in London since the start of the year.
Not only was there just one female among the victims, but the vast majority of the suspects are male, mostly aged 16-21.
The Sun calls the outbreak of violence a symptom of Broken Britain; the Daily Mail 'Britain's growing knife crime menace'; while the Daily Mirror asks 'Why are our kids killing each other?'
But delve a little deeper and another question arises: Why are young men killing each other?
This subject will have tortured the parents of three other young victims of unprovoked attacks, all in their late teens or early 20s: Daniel Pollen, Daniel Coffill and Thomas Grant.
All three had gone out without the slightest intention of causing trouble, but the headlines reveal the harrowing violence they were to suffer at the hands of their peers:
The trigger to each attack was as banal as the violence was baffling.
Thomas Grant looked at his assailant the wrong way. Daniel Pollen was simply standing on the street at night waiting for a lift.
Only Daniel Coffill, an off-duty police officer who refused to furnish two youths with a lighter, survived. But he will never walk again and remains in a persistent vegetative state.
It goes without saying that the attackers were all male, and aged between 16 and 22.
The youths who set upon Daniel Coffill and Daniel Pollen did so from the privileged position of a group, and may have gone to such appalling lengths to somehow impress their friends.
However, in summing up the three-week trial following the death of Daniel Pollen, whose friend Andrew Griffiths was also attacked, the prosecutor said: "We are no nearer any clear explanation for the unleashing of that gratuitous violence on two entirely innocent young men."
The advice of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, aimed at precisely this group - 16-24-year old males, who are more likely to be attacked than any other in society - will have awakened devastating memories for the three victims' families.
It recommends keeping calm and attempting to talk your way out of aggressive situations.
Responses from callers to a radio phone-in were revealing in themselves. "What next," said one, "are we going to be told not to go out without hankies and our wallets?"
Which is an adequate illustration of a point made by the trust's chief executive Steven Gauge: that women are much better at staying safe on the streets than men.
And therein lies the deadly disease of bravado, whose twin attributes, a desire to assert one's authority over others, and the unwillingness to be seen to give a damn, are two sides of the same coin.
The dangers of this mindset were equally well expressed in the death of Michael Toye, the Southampton man who poured white spirit on his body and set himself alight in an attempt to prove to his friend that the liquid was not flammable.
He declined to be seen by paramedics, but said: "I just want a fag and a beer."
"A possible act of bravado," the coroner said.
As long as this bravado persists among young men, a market for male-targeted personal safety advice will continue to thrive. As will, for the extremely unlucky ones, ambulances, care workers and coffins.