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

But there are some behaviours which are unacceptable regardless of what diagnosis and individual has. If you're talking about them having melt downs or stimming then, sure, allow them control of that as at the end of the day it's not hurting anyone. But if someone is stockpiling weapons and planning violent attacks then, yeah, you're gonna want to take control away from them pdq.

Very dangerous to try to 'control' an autistic child with very high levels of anxiety - whether you call that PDA or ODD or just high anxiety. It just increases their need for control and puts everyone at risk really. It's pick your battles, one thing at a time, reduce demands as much as possible. Also what's causing the anxiety? Demands? The environment?

Saying just take control off a child is far too simplistic as this can be very risky.

Theres another thread about this about the ND factor within this and time and time again, threads pop up about managing a violent aggressive bullying child, who also happens to have ND

Time again, when posters point out that the child is in control and shouldnt have control, they are shouted down that either ODD or PDA profiles mean you cant use a concept like 'the child being in control' and the child feeling out of control is what is leading to their behaviour. BS

Not to mention the idea of the child 'feeling safe' and therefore thats why you see their worst behaviour. No, the child is behaving that way because they want to be aggressive and violent, is not because they were masking all day or because this is their safe space.

So this child was in control of the household and probably would hvae been explained away, the way it is so often on this site.

Let's stop this victim stuff. The people who should have been protected were those murdered and injured by this horrific attack. They are the victims.

My issue with all this is what could actually have been done?

What are the options to ID what help might be needed and how does the process work to get the help needed? If the help needed is isolation and being held somewhere secure, where exactly is that?

If nobody knows what to do or where to refer and nobody knows what to do with these people if they are then what?

I watched the inquiry. All of it! I had a very long project to complete so had it in the background.

Everyone is to blame. The police, MH services. But yes also it was the parents. And ultimately they were the ones who knew he had purchased and stock piled weapons the week prior. So it was the parents. I know it’s hard to get someone sectioned but it is possible if you don’t let it go. And they did. They gave up.

I like this idea but we'd have to move to China to have this level of state discipline and punishment or shall we call it robust management of unsavoury characters.

As a society I think there's a massive problem in how we deal with violent, mentally unstable individuals. (When I say "individuals", we're mostly talking about men.) We no longer lock them up in mental institutions. We let them live in the community and ask them to take their medication - but, apparently, in the Valdo Calocane case, where he refused to take his medication, it was felt that nothing could be done.

There seems to be a fear of going back to a situation of cruel Victorian institutions where people were locked up for life for 'crimes' such as homosexuality or pregnancy out of wedlock.

It is - surely - possible to recognise that some people should be removed from society for their own and (more importantly) others' safety. That can be done humanely and with all appropriate legal oversight, but it still needs to be done. Care In The Community has been an enormous failure, and time and time again it has lead to people being killed by those who should long since have been kept safely away. Sometimes 'locking them up' is the help they need AND the least worst option for everyone else.

The parents experience of their son being found on a bus with a knife by police and stating that he wanted to stab someone and had had thoughts about using poison was that the police brought him home and advised then to hide their household knives.

That doesn't to me suggest encouragement to them to take his risks seriously, because the police certainly did not do so.

The parents experience of professionals was that there were endless referrals, discussions and meetings, and that said professionals could be persuaded to change wording in certain documents with a little pressure.

That doesn't to me suggest encouragement to them that if they did honestly share information about their son's risks, the professional response would be robust.

I think it is very easy, and comforting, to sit back and state this is mostly parental failure. I don't think there is a single person or agency to blame, but I do blame the systems and agencies with knowledge of the family more than the family themselves. Various practitioners had witnessed the level of control AR exerted over his parents and would have known these were not parents who could recognise and appropriately respond to AR's risks. Yes, their parenting was inadequate, with appalling consequences. But that their parenting was inadequate was known already and the system did not act.

Nope. It is his responsibility as a father to keep his son in check. The man is literally paid to fight other men, but apparently it's "astonishing" to think that he would be fearful of his son. So fearful he allowed him to keep a holdall of hunting knives and arrows in the living room.

My suggestions of stopping internet for such a person and also allowing police to regularly search their home for weapons once they are found with an illegal weapon the first time would go quite far to stop such young men following through and / or posing such a high risk.

Perhaps alongside some compulsory voluntary service (somewhere away from girls and alongside decent men who can become better role models than the internet).

They were having meetings and talking about it. But nothing was actually done.

But surely a crime had been committed if an under 18 was ordering weapons for delivery to his house? But no-one alerted the police

My solutions to have prevented these deliberate murders of 3 young girls:

If a child is found to be carrying a knife, police can search his bedroom / house. If they find evidence of buying weapons online, they can do repeat searches.

If a child has shown violent behaviours or threats, the government can stop internet access to their home. Tough for the parents, sure, but necessary. They can go to a library to access the internet, the child can go to school.

This latter one would have a beneficial knock on for many people in society who don't want to be forced to do everything online that companies would be forced to offer an alternative also. Including schools providing paper homework not online.

I'm sure there would be a lot of handwringing about both but frankly it's all bullshit compared to the lives of 3 young girls.

And more generally, the police start arresting for and prosecuting low level crime and not wait until it's escalated to murder (as they also did with Wayne Couzens). Stop policing free speech and start policing actual crimes.

Of course, in a sane world he could also have been charged and sentenced to custody for carrying a knife, but the government just brought in more legislation to encourage non-court, community disposals for that too, so...

My suggestions of stopping internet for such a person and also allowing police to regularly search their home for weapons once they are found with an illegal weapon the first time would go quite far to stop such young men following through and / or posing such a high risk.

Perhaps alongside some compulsory voluntary service (somewhere away from girls and alongside decent men who can become better role models than the internet).

I think they thought that the main aim was to keep him stable, as then he wouldn't escalate and do something. My nephew was really quite scary as a young man. We all walked on egg shells around him. It's easy to say they could have done this or that but the idea the dad wasn't scared of him....the fury these young men can unleash at the drop of a hat is utterly terrifying to most people. And if dad had laid a finger on him, chances are he would have been charged, given a criminal record, forced to leave the house by the nice professionals working with the son, leaving his mother to deal with him on her own. Fact is, families are in a very dangerous situation with these volatile, angry young men.

I think that's a very basic and naive reading of both the situation in that house and abuse dynamics.

I also think 'may have fought in a civil war' is a somewhat misleading description of the experience of an 18 year old Tutsi man during the Rwandan genocide.

And to suggest that being a judo instructor means someone will be immune from fear of a disturbed person is really quite astonishing.

I can absolutely guarantee you that had this boy at 17 been made subject to a welfare order, not a single secure unit in the country would take him, because the risk he'd pose to the other young people in the unit would be too great.

You would not believe how many teenage males are made subject to welfare orders by courts, who are recognised as posing significant risk to the public, who then don't get placed because their risk is too high!

It's a huge problem and there is an unwillingness of our politicians to recognise and address it.

I'm still not sure what could have been done, legally.

Would he have met the criteria for detention under the mental health act, or for a custodial sentence, prior to the Southport murders?

Could secure accommodation have been found - would there have been a legal framework for detaining him there?

What I mean is, he had done those things and they had been dealt with so no one in authority was going to lock him up "just in case". They simply don't do that. Parents who do ask for help are turned away and told to go on a parenting course. That's it.

Like I said, I am an adopter. I know many families with really, really challenging adolescent boys/young men. The parents are supposed to fix everything.

I guess the parents in this case were completely stumped as to what to do. If they reported him, he might kill them - they would have learned that social services/police etc weren't going to offer any practical help.

Fact is, there are no services for what is basically internment for young people. Secure units are hard to come by and are mainly for those at risk of self harm, who have a mental health diagnosis, or seen at great risk, again to themselves, through being out of parental control.

Threaten to kill your parents for example or even harm them, nothing much will happen. In this case, there was no mental health condition to get him admitted, so that was the end of that.

We need proper services for this kind of situation.