The Southport Inquiry makes grim reading: grieve afresh for Bebe, Elsie and Alice, for their families and all those injured on the terrible day when Axel Rudakubana took a knife to the dance class.
Grieve too, more angrily, at the almost blackly comic failures of all our anxious, bossy, heavily regulated public agencies to prevent it.
Rage at society’s failure to organise simple safety, just as we did after the killings by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham.
The inquiry says that Rudakubana’s brutality was not some ‘bolt from the blue’ but unambiguously signalled over years to numerous bodies in a diabolical ‘merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case closures and hand-offs’. Failures were made by police, mental health professionals in the NHS, social services and even counterterrorism officers – he was repeatedly referred to Prevent.
On top of that, he was able to buy lethal knives with no trouble at all, not on some mysterious dark web but Amazon, the most familiar and homely of online markets. Which has, by the way, not even been fined for its lackadaisically inadequate ‘safeguards’ (it said the teenager was ‘visibly over 25’, as if such a glance was of the slightest use).
There are parallels with the case of Valdo Calocane, though he at least had a diagnosis of serious mental illness, albeit badly supervised and allowed to ignore his medication. There, the failure to identify his dangerousness was partly because some box-ticking fool worried about the ‘over-representation of black men in custody’.
In the case of Rudakubana, another social taboo left him free to act: though on the autistic ‘spectrum’ and preoccupied with violent online videos, he was not seriously ill. But he was 17: thus still officially a child and so more likely to be regarded as ‘vulnerable’ than dangerous.
As one social worker explained, his assaults in the home would always be ‘viewed through the lens of child protection’. There may, of course, also have been anxiety about condemning and restraining him because of his race.
We need, both at an official level and a private one, to stop it happening again – however young the potential killer, whatever their race or background.
If prevention sometimes leads to unwelcome, seemingly unfair questions by public officials – or to periods of confinement which at the time distress families – we must face that discomfort, hoping it is brief and turns out to be unnecessary (the majority of people with serious mental conditions are harmless, take their medication and are safely loved).
Some who have been almost as crazily obsessed with violence as Rudakubana have channelled it safely and grown into better mental health.
But when there are signposts, those with a professional duty to follow them must do so, and be blamed if they don’t.
And the parents? At the inquiry, Sir Adrian Fulford spoke harshly about the Southport couple, citing ‘considerable blame’ at their failing to defy their terrible son, and being ‘manipulative and harmful’ in dealing with agencies involved in his care. This raises mixed feelings.
When we first heard Alphonse Rudakubana’s testimony at the inquiry and his regret that ‘love overruled good judgment’, I expressed some sympathy: a churchgoing man, he paid for private counselling for the boy, he took parenting lessons and denied getting in the way of social services. ‘It’s me who called them,’ he claimed.
He added that when the police caught Axel with a knife in 2022, rather than detain him, they brought him home and lectured his mother on ‘securing knives in the home’.
But, fair enough, the inquiry has concluded that Axel’s parents share the blame. And certainly the detail that Axel’s mother discovered the knife packaging hidden in their home on the fatal day, but did nothing about it, suggests some culpability.
And yet if you try, as a parent, to put yourself in their place it is horrifying. From the first nursery encounters you hope and pray that your children are benign: not biters or bullies, or not more than once, and that they are sorry. Nobody willingly thinks they’ve nurtured a psychopath. You hope everything is a phase. It must be bleakly lonely. When I wrote about this I had heartbreaking letters from people who have lived through assault by a child and got little support even when, feeling like traitors, they actually called the police.
One more thing. As children get older you lose touch with their influences, and may also lose awareness of what chemicals they are ingesting. All over the country there are kids left alone for hours with online horrors, staring at screens built to be addictive, children who know the local dealers of pocket-money-cheap drugs.
Few will become Rudakubanas but some, when a random provocation taxes their weakened self-control, will explode. Their parents may be the last to expect it.
We are sentimentally fond of quoting ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, but too often there’s no village watching, no villager willing to report and judge. That’s not good enough. Whatever the embarrassment, community upset or risk of misunderstanding ordinary high-spirits and being demonised as a busybody for speaking out and reporting, we must do so. It’s worth it.
