For Leanne Lucas, the most innocent of interactions, such as cooking with friends, can be a terrible trigger, instantly dragging her back to a scene of almost incomprehensible horror.

Leanne is the teacher who, less than two years ago, organised the Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance children’s workshop in Southport which ended in carnage at the hands of 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana.

His cowardly attack with a kitchen knife saw him fatally stab seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, and Bebe King, six. Ten others were injured, including Leanne herself, who has been credited with saving many lives that day.

Countless people have commended her brave actions, including Prince William and Taylor Swift herself. Still, Leanne – a thoughtful, slight woman – understandably remains racked by a gamut of emotions: trauma at what she witnessed, guilt for having survived herself and an impossible sadness woven into every cell in her body.

‘I can’t ever erase what happened that day from my memory. It’s a huge part of who I’ve developed into now,’ she explains, admitting she finds it hard to even see a knife.

‘There have been times, where I’ve been at people’s houses, they’ve been cooking, and they’ve turned to talk to me with the knife in their hand and I’ve just gone...’ She flinches. ‘I knew they weren’t going to do anything, but you feel it.’

In the wake of the attack, Leanne, 37, admits she initially felt scared even to go into her kitchen. Her PTSD-related flashbacks are thankfully less frequent now, but her nightmares continue, often featuring her being attacked with a knife. 

The chances of her returning to yoga teaching are, she says, slim. ‘I don’t feel safe at yoga now, because you have to close your eyes and it brings it all back,’ she admits. ‘Of course it is worse because I was responsible for the children that day.

‘That’s why I’m not back in the classroom now, because if this ever happened again, I know I can’t save 30 people.’

Admirably, she has tried to channel her emotions into campaigning for changes to the laws around knife crime. It is this zeal which has seen her nominated for this year’s Daily Mail Inspirational Women Awards.

‘I’m really honoured to even be included in the list of nominees. Awards are never the reason I do my campaigning work, but it’s really lovely to have it recognised.’

Leanne may not be the type of person to seek credit, but she does say some of the Southport families have written to thank her for her campaign work. ‘Before, I only saw the worst in humanity,’ she says. 

‘Now, working with so many inspiring people, it really gives me a sense that there’s so much good in society. There’s a space to make a change and I can with what I experienced.’

That experience, however, has led her to the darkest places.

During the Southport Inquiry hearing, which began in July 2025, Leanne admits she contemplated ending her life.

The strain of being in the spotlight, along with online abuse for not just being a survivor, but a witness and the host of the class, was overwhelming. She says it left her feeling ‘worse than a criminal’ despite her heroic actions.

She was not fit to appear at the inquiry in person but her harrowing impact statement detailed what happened on July 29, 2024.

Leanne had enlisted her best friend, Heidi Liddle, to help with teaching that day. Some of the 26 young attendees were making friendship bracelets in the Hart Space studio when an ominous figure, wearing a green hoodie and medical face mask, walked in.

Within moments, Axel Rudakubana had grabbed one child, and then the next, before turning his knife on Leanne.

She remembers shouting ‘run’ to the children, frantically ushering them towards the door and trying to protect them, before calling 999. She then collapsed herself, after suffering five stab wounds: to her spine, her head, her ribs, her lung and her shoulder blade, which required urgent hospital care. The physical damage is the least of it for her, though.

‘My scars are such a small part of what I carry,’ Leanne says. ‘They mean little in comparison to the emotional damage that’s been done internally, to my heart.’

As if the experience of the attack wasn’t enough, relentless online abuse left her in an even darker place. ‘Some people wondered why I left the room to get help but they weren’t there,’ says Leanne. ‘The last thing I would ever want is for a child to be hurt.’

The inquiry made her recovery ‘a thousand times worse’, as she was once again in the spotlight.

‘For all the abuse and negativity I was getting, I just felt that everything would have been easier if I had died in the room that day.’ The only reason she didn’t act on those suicidal thoughts, she says, brimming with tears, is ‘because of the thought of upsetting my family’.

The impetus for her to begin campaigning on knife crime came towards the end of January 2025, as the criminal case against Rudakubana revealed details Leanne did not recall hearing.

Namely, the attack knife that had caused such devastation was a £1.70 Amazon purchase, just 20cm long and common in most households across the world.

‘Seeing the picture of this kitchen knife in court, it shocked me,’ she says, softly.

‘I’d been trying to piece things together with a counsellor, but that was when I realised, “We all have kitchen knives, they are so accessible to anyone. How are we going to tackle knife crime when they are everywhere?”’

It was, she learnt, the fact that knives have pointed tips which cause so many fatalities and injuries. From that moment, she threw herself into a new cause, first conducting research into the impact of pointed-tip knives.

The actor Idris Elba’s own Don’t Stop Your Future initiative and his backing for rounded tips for kitchen use inspired her, too – as did the public support for such knives from chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

It sparked an idea to start her own campaign – a thought she shared with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer when he visited Southport after the attack.

Her campaign Let’s Be Blunt was launched during Knife Crime Awareness Week in May 2025, with the help of her sister, Chelsie, and brother-in-law, James. It called for the adoption of rounded-tip kitchen knives – a simple change designed to reduce harm – although Leanne would like to work towards an eventual ban on pointed-tip knives in domestic settings.

She began by urging households, manufacturers, retailers and policymakers to act. Early backing came from local manufacturer Viners.

By September 2025, Let’s Be Blunt had become a community interest company (CIC) – a hybrid between a business and a charity – allowing it to deliver prevention-led training to adults working with children across the public sector.

Patrick Green, CEO of The Ben Kinsella Trust, introduced Leanne to two key collaborators.

One was Leisa Nichols-Drew of De Montfort University, a former Home Office forensic scientist whose research found rounded blades could reduce homicides by up to half. She also met Caley Walden from the Kent and Medway Violence Reduction Unit, who led a knife-swap scheme for families at risk. With their expertise, Let’s Be Blunt helped implement similar programmes nationwide.

Leanne championed Safe Disposal Bins, secure public containers for weapons, working with councils to expand their use.

Her campaigning quickly grew with the rapid progress of schemes in Greater Manchester, Kent, Wigan and Sheffield that have seen thousands of knives forfeited – with plans to replicate the success across the UK.

Her work has also expanded to helping tackle domestic violence; kitchen knives are the most commonly used sharp instruments in homicides. In the year to March 2024, sharp instruments accounted for 262 deaths in England and Wales, with kitchen knives used in 109 cases. 

Leanne has raised this fact with safeguarding minister Jess Phillips: ‘What’s the most accessible item at home that you can hurt someone with? The kitchen knife. So it makes total sense why the domestic abuse statistic is that high. It’s not just domestic abuse of women. It could be child-on-parent domestic abuse.

‘We have had a lot of cases come forward – not just women, but men and parents being abused by their children and wanting to do safer knife swaps.’

Today, Leanne is part of the Home Office Knife Crime Coalition and supports the Knife Crime Coordination Centre – a unit designed to improve collaboration – as the Government bids to halve knife crime.

She has worked with Amazon to promote safer knives and alongside campaigners including Pooja Kanda OBE – whose 16-year-old son was killed by a teenager wielding a ninja sword in a case of mistaken identity – on stronger regulations for knife licensing.

Let’s Be Blunt now directs families to services offering knife swaps, and offers guidance on how to dispose of knives safely. It also works on school partnerships, and offers knife crime prevention training to everyone from foster parents to staff at universities, care homes and retailers.

‘We know we are driving change,’ she says. ‘Wigan knife disposal bins alone have seen over 3,000 [knife] deposits since last July. One bin is now being put into each borough in Greater Manchester following the success in Wigan.

‘We can’t ever say how many of those knife swaps and other preventative measures have stopped people dying, but I know we have definitely saved lives.

‘Running Let’s Be Blunt will never take away the pain that I have for the girls who died, and for the surviving girls, but to know that we aren’t adding more and more to that list of names, that’s something to fight for.’

Last October, Leanne was presented with a prestigious Binney Award – one of the highest accolades of bravery the National Police Chiefs’ Council can give to civilians.

‘That’s when I think I realised, “I must have done something right,”’ Leanne admits, dissolving into tears at the memory.

‘It was very hard to acknowledge bravery when everyone had so many opinions about me – but what would anyone else have done in that scenario?’

Her sights are now set on improving the after-care for victims of atrocities like that in Southport, following the inadequate help she received herself. Today, Leanne is on her fourth counsellor and her third victim-support case worker.

It is through speaking to others that she’s been able to move on from her self-blame. After paying a visit to Southport, Prince William connected Leanne with Manchester Arena attack survivor Dr Cath Hill.

‘Cath and I talked a lot about survivor’s guilt, and about how people now have this opinion about you, even if they don’t know you,’ she says. ‘[Speaking to her] really gave me confidence, because I’d started to believe what happened was my fault.’

So traumatised was she after the attack, Leanne had to move back home with her parents, Alison and John. Thankfully, she no longer fears leaving the house, as she once did. A constant good-luck charm of hers is a bracelet Cath gave her with a hamsa symbol on it – a symbol of protection and power and strength.

‘I put it on every day that I leave the house,’ she says.

As for Rudakubana, in January 2025 at Liverpool Crown Court, he was jailed for a minimum of 52 years. Last month, the inquiry report blamed Axel’s parents, who failed to set boundaries for their reclusive, violence-obsessed son. It also criticised police, NHS trusts and a local authority who passed the buck between each other, meaning warnings about the disturbed teenager never led to action.

‘It’s horrific because this should never, ever have happened to us,’ Leanne says. ‘Everyone failed us.’

Her friendship with Heidi remains mutually supportive. ‘We’re there, cheering each other on,’ she smiles tenderly.

Indeed, on the one-year anniversary of the attack, Leanne and Heidi planted 26 sunflowers in a secret garden near their home.

‘There was one for every girl –the ones who died and the surviving girls who are often forgotten but were part of it, too,’ Leanne says, touchingly.

Leanne says she will never stop playing Taylor Swift music, either. ‘Some of her songs make me cry but I think it’s good therapy,’ she says. The singer wrote Leanne a letter of support before meeting her and other Southport survivors.

‘The future looks hopeful now, though,’ says Leanne. ‘If you look at every family linked to the incident, [Rudakubana] hasn’t defeated us. He’s tried to break us, we’re really hurt, but everyone from that day has a fight in them to carry on.

‘I would never give him the satisfaction that he’s taken away who I was before now.’

To donate to Let’s Be Blunt, visit: gofundme.com/f/lets-be-blunt-cic

Do YOU know a woman who has done something truly inspirational? Send in a nomination for this year's Inspirational Women Awards here