Southport report lays bare the failures of authorities - and the attacker's parents

So basically you're saying that I can have a child, teach him to be violent and resent the world, and then walk away and blame the state for what he's become?

A lot of times the men who supposedly have mental health or whatever other issues that we're supposed to give a shit about are sane and competent enough to know which are the weaker humans to target, killing women and girls and not aiming for the big muscly men who would have a decent chance of fighting back and doing as much damage to them as they hope to inflict on others.

And it's about time the police recognise that a young man like this being allowed to walk free so many times is a death sentence to women and girls. When he was spoken to by police for having a knife on a bus he should have been arrested which then would have allowed the police to search his room where they would have found ricin, many weapons and a terrorist manual - reason for several charges. And those girls would not have died.

It’s completely relevant to the point. It’s a demonstration of escalating behaviour. And I’m sorry but I would not have walked on eggshells around him. Sometimes these “angry young men” need to face some consequences for their actions. Maybe they need to witness the fury of others for a change?

It was a failure of institutions and parents - as found in this inquiry.

One thing that would save £££ that there is always claimed there isn't enough of would be no appeals for exclusions for bringing weapons into school. For some things we need to take a hard line as a society, to prevent what happened to Alice, Elsie and Bebe ever happening again.

My thoughts are with their families and the other families affected and I hope they manage to hold some people accountable now this inquiry has found he should have been stopped and there were opportunities to do so. Whilst I am sure they already really knew that their children should not have died, it must be hard nevertheless to hear this conclusion and I will do all I can to support them in their fight for justice.

Insane he was allowed into school 10 times with a knife. Insane when stopped by police for having a knife on a bus he was allowed home. This is not the sign of a decent society.

Society needs to be kept safe.

We don't need any more dead kids.

We shouldn't have any more dead kids.

Kids shouldn't kill kids.

Society needs to be kept safe.

I'm saying that some children are beyond the parenting stage - that in these cases, the authorities need to step in and take over.

This family was in the system, only the system kept down playing the dangers and sending the boy home.

We need to accept that some children ARE dangerous - part of the problem herevis that some factors (his ethnicity, autism, lack of a mental health diagnosis, lack of an ideology) meant no one took that step and upgraded him to the serious level.

No matter what he did, he was sent back home.

Being beyond parental control is a well established concept in social care. It comes about for various reasons.

The various authorities he kept being referred to should have understood this and taken him into some kind of expert service.

Either we accept that some young people need this level of support and put the support in place, or we take the view that all children must stay at home and we will leave it to their parents, regardless of how challenging they are or how effective the parents are.

I want us to have the former.

Yes no £££ but then a fortune spent on another public inquiry. If all the money spent on public inquiries after the fact were put in front line services they would be so much better resourced.

That's irrelevant to the point I'm making about how terrifying angry young men can be. I don't know what my sister in law would have done if he had done that. She had been trying to get help for him for years. Then when he turned 18 she asked him to leave - there are practically no options for housing single young men. No one offers any practical help. You are more or less on your own.

It could still be an issue tbh if it's not done properly and with proper MH advice and support. I suspect there would be a risk of placement breakdown which could lead to ATU type placement (which would cost the NHS a fortune). It's all about money and no resources on the ground. It's systemic. Everyone has to protect their budget and resources, there's no joined up thinking or working. Services really struggle to coordinate with other services.

I agree with this. So many threads on here from parents who excuse away their children’s poor, violent, manipulative behaviour and allow them to spend their days online doing god knows what.

Well those little children become big adults, and if a child is able to manipulate and hurt its mother at the age of 5 then imagine what that child will grow up to be able to do to society at large?

I do blame the parents. I had a cousin who would happily sit there and tear the wings off flies and his parents did nothing. He is now in prison. These behaviours always escalate if they are not stopped.

This man has been arrested and charged. He is 27 years old. Not a child. He was also known for many years to local youth workers working on schemes including knife crime/prevention. Those schemes obviously failed. No one knows what to do with these people or what works.

This is clearly a case where AR should have been deprived of his liberty. His parents should have been clear about their difficulties and the fact they were scared of him says it all. It’s not acceptable to do nothing.

If the child is in a place where violence isn't possible - a secure place with people trained to contain such violence safely - then it wouldn't be an issue.

Agree. As far as I can tell the schools were the only ones who thought about the impact on other children and their right to be safe.

Schools must be allowed to exclude in order to keep other children safe. There is far too much pressure on them to fulfil the role of social care for the minority rather than focus on education of the majority.

Pretty much every organisation failed and the parents failed but the schools did not. However it's utterly ridiculous he brought a knife to school so many times before being excluded and why on earth was this also not a criminal charge? (I watched the statement from Sir Adrian Fulford and I think he said he took a knife to school TEN times). Absolute insanity that schools are expected to deal with this. Bring a knife to school one time should be permanent exclusion from that school with no chance of appeal. Apart from anything else, why on earth should teachers be expected to work in that environment?

They could have forced a placement if they had really wanted to.

If you read the report, towards the end AR going into care was suggested, even if for a temporary period. After that, the parents refused to allow SS into the house.

If services weren't prepared to provide support at home & MH support plus respite and wouldn't admit him to a CAMHS bed then it's residential care. The situation wasn't improving, it went on for years, the family and others were at serious risk. This could have happened. It didn't.

I've also been thinking about what it does to us to live with the level of fear AR's parents were experiencing. Many of us have lived with an abusive, dangerous male.

I agree with this. Although the parents must take some responsibility for what happened, it must have been horrendous for them. We know that every year about 10 or 12 women are killed by their sons. Imagine how terrifying it is knowing that your child has a propensity to extreme violence.

Where should he have been living and did the parents want him to go there?

Any boundaries have got to be put in very safely and in a way that doesn't increase violence. By reducing the child's anxiety behaviours will reduce - whether this is changing the environment, reducing demands on the child etc. This is when boundaries can be put in place. It's not acceptable to expect a family to implement any strategy that might put them at risk and in this case did lead to escalation. AR should not have been living with his family, they did not have the expertise or support to manage his level of need.

Not allowing your son a holdall full of weapons is not "laying a finger" on him.

Seriously, there are threads and threads about VAWG and demanding that men step up and take responsibility. How father's need to teach their sons properly.

Here it is a father's responsibility to keep his son in check, and people are saying that it isn't this man's responsibility!

It's not solely their fault but, at the end of the day, they are the ones who watched their son walk off to commit this massacre and they did nothing. He had told them he was going to do something like this, he had stockpiled weapons and then he left the house for the first time in years. And they thought he was just going for a walk? Please. Fair enough if they didn't want to tackle him themselves but a reasonable person would at least have called the police.

While you might consider which demands to put on a demand-avoidant child very carefully, one of the non-negotiable, consistently applied boundaries needs to be not hurting others.

And the risk of not doing this? Try that argument with the parents of 3 young girls he murdered and all the others he tried to murder.

There were plenty of opportunities for services to step in for a very long time. We cannot just blame the parents. It's much more complex than that.