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

Sorry can't work out edit button. That should say that dealing with services is a part time job in itself. I couldn't imagine working nights (if they were doing that at the time) AND dealing with services with a huge amount of trauma and the sheer exhaustion of everything. While walking on eggshells and trying not to distress the older brother who by all accounts was very academic and doing A levels and who needed a lot of support too.

Psychosis is different as it's a very clear cut psychiatric emergency so they would admit. Tbh I suspect that some of the time it's due to not enough CAMHS beds but could be really wrong about this. Read the book on this one! The kids just get batted back to families.

My questions at this stage are:

1. What caused AR's sudden decline? If he had had support for his ASD and if that had been diagnosed earlier and given support eg at school would he have declined?

2. Were there carers for his brother?

3. Was home tuition provided?

4. Child to mother violence is sadly pretty much seen as an acceptable risk. I suspect that because it was against his father it was viewed as even more acceptable. We've discussed the difficulties of restraint and how this is generally frowned upon, the strength of a dysregulated child

5. Why were they not given support to implement boundaries? Why is the reason that they didn't want to escalate a volatile situation and not get hurt and not impact on the stress to brother not viewed as understandable? Was there any safety planning?

6. Why was the impact of trauma not taken into account with dealings with services? Parents had been through a lot of trauma plus coping with the impact of elder son's disability plus coping with sudden decline of AR plus dealing with services which can be traumatic by itself. And a part time job as someone mentioned earlier. It doesn't appear as if their views were potentially as taken into account as they could have been but that could be my over extrapolating.

7. It looks like they were both working night shifts - I think I've got that right. Was this to be around in the day for AR? Was the sheer exhaustion of working nights taken into account in decision making?

The video that OP posted earlier is by far the most balanced reporting that I've seen.

it’s a case of not working together to help their communities and passing the buck. The report is clear about this.

Yes and also if the individuals such as Samantha Steed who silenced the head teacher’s concerns on the grounds she was being racist, keep their jobs, then things won’t improve.

@Theeyeballsinthesky There cannot be excuses like that! There are people doing these jobs who are tasked with keeping us safe! Just saying not enough staff is not good enough. All these services must prioritise. You run the service based on the worst cases. This is why the police prioritise investigating murder over theft. There are similar priorities in SS and health. What happens is that no one speaks to each other and acts. Prevent said he didn’t meet their criteria. This child should not have been living at home. Various routes exist to have deprived him of his liberty. None were taken, despite a hugely worrying series of events. It’s not a case of numbers of staff or money, it’s a case of not working together to help their communities and passing the buck. The report is clear about this.

Nonsense did he not meet the threshold.

I have had psychosis, I got sectioned for running round the town shouting the gov are trying to kill me 😭

Embarassing. But I wasn’t a threat to myself or anyone else just clearly gone mental.

A kid who’s going round beating people up and carrying knives saying he wants to kill people has clearly gone mental AND is a risk to others.

Hes 100% delusional. I still don’t know how he was tried criminally tbh.

I am convinced he wears that mask at trial to hide his smiling underneath. When I was psychotic I used to smile in my sleep. It was so disconcerting.

He’s a very sick individual and it is so obvious to me he has persecution delusions. I don’t know how professionals can’t see it.

I don't think he met the threshold so got batted down the criminal justice route? It's a case of refer somewhere, threshold not met, refer somewhere else etc which is why parents end up managing all the risk with no support. Even happens within the same organisation!

I don't know why he wasn't getting tutoring at home via his EHCP if he wasn't attending any provision. Or why there were no PAs given the fact his brother's disability too but that might be somewhere in the inquiry report.

I am going to be blunt here because to me this is as clear as anything.

He should have been sectioned.

Sectioned when he went to school and broke that kids arm for thinking that he was being bullied - that no one agreed with. From memory I think they didn’t even know who he was.

Sectioned when found on a bus saying he wanted to kill people with a knife.

Sectioned when he was at home, wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t showering and was purchasing weapons online and saying everyone was out to get him.

No one sectioned him!

Section 2 is for assessment. There’s no way this unhinged individual would get through 30 days of monitoring without it raising serious red flags. At which point he might have been helped.

You do have to be really careful with restraint! It's one of those things that no one is allowed to show you how to do properly. It's a really difficult situation.

I wouldn't normally talk about my experiences but I feel that it's important not to vilify the parents or the professionals in this when the reality is much more complicated. I'm sure that if I hadn't experienced this and how systems work for very many years I would share the general national opinion though.

The police tell you to restrain as best as you can but even if there's two of you it's really hard to do as no one can underestimate the superhuman strength of a dysregulated child so you still get hurt. Social care do view it negatively because of the impact on the child but I don't think that that's a genuine thing as of course you've got to do it. In my case I restrained if my child could harm themselves but took it if I was the one getting harmed and that can go on for hours. It's really strange as you just learn to dissociate and you completely normalise it, partly because it's from your child. That's why reading the transcript of the parents' evidence is different for me than for other people.

We did eventually get help as our situation was very extreme and kept on escalating although the process of that was also traumatic. And it's amazing how quickly people can jump into action. Without that I don't know what would've happened. Social care did work hard as they had to get people working together which is no mean feat believe me! Everyone is just so busy and overworked so I can see this from a lot of different perspectives.

The interview posted above is spot on but to me it just feels that everyone has to firefight so much as there aren't enough social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, police etc.

The parent would possibly be arrested and made to leave the house. It can be utterly catastrophic so most parents learn not to try any physical interventions.

There's little you can do as very often no one helps you, you are pretty much on your own, even restraining a child is viewed as causing emotional harm.

@Thekidsarefightingagain

If parents restrain their child to protect themselves, do social services threaten to remove the child?
I have been reading all your posts and it must have been incredibly hard for you and your family to be unable to get any meaningful help.

You can't really protect yourselves. There's little you can do as very often no one helps you, you are pretty much on your own, even restraining a child is viewed as causing emotional harm. Adult safeguarding thresholds are never met. The police are very kind but can't do much except raise yet more safeguarding concerns and calling them out is a last resort. You end up picking your battles and over accomodating to avoid ending up in A&E. Child has a lot of control. It's all very well talking about boundaries but no one wants to end up in a rapidly escalating violent situation that could put everyone at risk. It's basic safeguarding.

There just doesn't seem to be anything set up to deal with child to parent violence. Also the recognition that parents need to be seen as equal partners - it's conversations about you, what you must be doing wrong etc which leads to a huge lack of trust - when you are already going through so much and often living in extreme situations. I suppose because systems aren't set up for that. I am hopeful that one thing that might come out of this is more awareness of this issue. Services are far too stretched and not really equipped to deal with this so it's understandable. People just give up trying to get help that just doesn't come.

It is far, far too simplistic as you say and the trauma on the family is immense. And the impact of that is underestimated and not fully understood. Hopefully this will lead to better training and frameworks. It's quite common but most people aren't aware of it. I may well be over extrapolating but I am sure that this will resonate with many. Well, I know it will.

I think the recognition that parents also need support and protection from violence would be a good starting point but I fear that we are a long way from that. Although every situation is different and there are many different reasons for child to parent/carer violence it's very much a national issue.

Yes, I think the trauma aspect of this is likely pertinent.

I also feel some surprise that the parents did not act in any way to protect themselves given that it sounds like they were frightened of him.

Additionally that is a whole talking point unto itself really.

I remember that very well. So essentially despite having schizophrenia they decided at trial that it wasn't a MH issue, he went to prison, they decided he was severely unwell after all.

Same old same old

He lacked capacity to volunteer for MH care so surely that could have been tested in court?

And more often than not the women have allowed their sons to own deadly weapons, such as in Plymouth where the son owned a shotgun, killed his mother and four other people.

There was an incident in London decades ago (not Hainualt two years ago) of someone with paranoid schizophrenia, for some reason his parents allowed him to keep a Samurai sword in his bedroom, and then he tried to go on a rampage with it.

There is this constant blind spot of people thinking that it's not their fault that their children can own and keep deadly weapons.

Does anyone remember the Rackhams attack in Bham where the guy went on a rampage in House of Fraser attacking women. They all survived luckily but it does remind me of this. Nothing changed after as far as I’m aware. He had a history of mental illness and was a few years later (despite receiving 10 life sentences) allowed out shopping in Stafford from a low security unit. We don’t learn do we.

You do frequently have to reduce demands with highly anxious autistic people. Whether their dysregulation is due to demands or the environment etc. Implementing certain behavioural approaches could be absolutely disastrous and this is well recognised and you need to be taught how to safely do this without triggering escalation. In this case as people are saying is that this should not have all been pinned on autism, it went above and beyond this.

Violence from a child to family members cannot be viewed as acceptable in any way, shape or form though and they need protection too. This needs to be part of the national picture.

Yes this is a harder question. Not sure atm but worth asking

Yes and someone might know more I’m sure but part of the trial process will include a report that covers whether the accused is mentally culpable.

There’s various defences for this. But that was not deemed relevant,

I understand some might have experienced dysregulation which can be lashing out but I do think AR is a separate case and autism shouldn’t be used to the extent it is.

Sorry I was responding to PP who talked about reducing demands - I've seen this myself my question was really to what point can you reduce demands? It's not something you can keep doing endlessly. There have to be boundaries in society for it to function or you get to the point of allowing criminality. Arguably we're already there - if you read sentencing often men doing awful things like having vast quantities of child torture material get reduced sentences because of this or that reason they're vulnerable. With seemingly no thought to the impact of what they're doing on risks to children.

I also think it's extremely unfair for the non-violent people with ASD when violence gets attributed in this way. It's a cop out, especially when acts of violence are planned / deliberate. It's one thing for someone who's dysregulated to lash out. It's another to deliberately target someone and it's not impossible to tell the difference.

You're right, you have to be right, its obvious

My point is more, that IF you argue and IF everyone agrees that a person like this is soley and wholly like they are due to their ND.... ok, so whats next, how do you 'fix' it, how do you change it, how do you work with it, how do you stop people like this

So people, professionals, who said, well its due to his autism or some such description, ok, so what then, how do you stop him behaving like this.

What are the resources to do that? Apart from locking him up which is not going to happen under current thresholds and legislation, remember children are not going to be criminalised there is a lot of work going into preventing that, and children with ND are seen to be harmed by hospitalisation so no one is going to argue for detainment (and he wouldnt have met any threshold for that anyway)

They weren't told to reduce demands at all, quite the opposite. They were told they were over accommodating which they were. They explained that they didn't want to get beaten up and why should they be allowed to get hurt?

It's true that with a diagnosis of ASD everything does seem to get put down to that.

Yes, effectively they 'reduced demands' to the level of also not actually having a demand not to do criminal things. And then seem to be shocked when he violently murdered 3 girls, which he said he wanted to do.

The demand to behave lawfully should apply no matter what.

There have to be protections for other people and this is what seems to be lacking in society today and people are getting VERY angry about that.