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

Yeah the pp is mixing apples with oranges. The MH route and the secure welfare route are completely separate. You don't get 'downgraded' to a secure children's home from a medium secure MH placement. The latter is more secure than the former and they're not on the same route.

I say this with a sad heart, but you are much, much more likely to get a bed at at secure children's home for a 14 year old female victim of a grooming gang than you are a 17 year old male with such a significant risk of violence. SCHs charge serious money and they decide who they take. It's easier money housing the former than the latter. And if they're already housing the former, they could argue that it would be negligent to accept the latter.

And believe me, the fact that the girls are locked up rather than the perpetrators is not lost on the girls.

As I said earlier, even with the order, the likelihood of getting a placement would be slim.

So health and criminal justice grounds then

Which is very different to seeking secure orders for children who dont have (which appears to be the case here) a MH, treatable diagnosed condition and/or a criminal justice provision to direct accommodation.

There is huge resistance to that, and when seeking for CAMHS to complege MHA assessments and then to follow on to detainment there again is a lot of resistance as I said earlier (or might have been a different thread, cant remember) to keep ND children/people out of hospital and away from secure and detainment. Its considered harmful to them

It's really tough. I was resigned to being killed by my child for years, he's in a very different place now. Residential would have been a disaster for him so it was the right decision not to offer a place. It doesn't undo the trauma that we all went through though.

My advice would be that if your child is struggling at school do anything to protect their mental health before it collapses even if that's home educating. Don't wait. Schools can't cope as it is and things are going to get worse. Don't expect CAMHS to be able to offer anything as they just can't. Don't expect social care to offer anything. There's no point fighting for resources that don't exist anymore. No one has any money.

Don't listen to the marble jar and sticker chart people. If you have to just pretend you're doing it. Don't feel pressured into using approaches that escalate towards violence or self harm and don't listen to anyone who tells you to do this as that's irresponsible and downright dangerous. Expect a lot of criticism especially if you're 'mum' but be mindful that what is written on paper isn't always what people really think.

@likelysuspect At the time I was working for CAMHS Assertive Outreach. Both kids were a tricky combination of mental health and criminal justice, and both held under 37/41 MHA. Neither was contested as it was obvious they couldn’t be kept safe in a standard adolescent acute unit but had acute psychiatric needs. One was stepped down to a secure children’s home and the other, as far as I know, is still there-but I don’t work for the service anymore so I don’t know. The trust is well provisioned for low and medium secure forensic meaning that it’s normally less about funding than suitability. Now, acute beds on the other hand…

Prevent is designed to assess and intervene to prevent terrorist offending and only terrorist offending. As violent and awful as his offence was, it was not terrorism in its goal or purpose so I would imagine when reviewing the case from that lense, other risks were not picked up/handed over to anyone else and that is where the failures occurred. It is not prevents remit to address risk of other violence. It seems as though a law change is required to capture and put services in place for people preparing to or posing a risk to carry out mass or serious harm to the public, but not in the name of terrorism. This was in the recent report by Jonathan hall.

Thank you for this post, it's really interesting. And I completely agree in that I have had close family friends tell me that my son "needs to be treated like everyone else".

Actually no he doesn't. We don't ask kids with mobility issues to walk upstairs and autistic children need similar adjustments made.

And we need to find humane and practical solutions for handling people who are dangerous, before tragic events occur.

Yes if you get it wrong terrible things happen - like Southport, like Nottingham. No one is saying there aren’t asylums/units/whatever but the advent of care in the community type approaches have done incredible damage and decimated the system. If the risk assessment is the problem then fine let’s sort that but I highly suspect it’s underfunding and a lack of placements that are the real issue. But that would require our inept successive governments to accept there is a problem and to fund something that is actually needed.

On welfare grounds or criminal justice route?

Had they had DOLs before in the community or straight to a request for a Secure Order? Did you need to give evidence or was it not contested?

Did the Guardian support you?

How long were each child there, what was the step down plan?

You'll just end up having to cope and probably normalise everything, it's just the way it is sadly. If you read older books about autism they say that this is often part of autism (or rather some children with autism) and that parents may need to consider residential school etc. But nowadays it's very much treated by society and sometimes by professionals as parents failing to control their child/general parents failing kind of thing - on the surface at least.

If a child has high levels of anxiety for whatever reason then boundaries have to be relaxed and then put in place once the anxiety is reduced otherwise you'll get escalation and things can get quite dangerous. This does seem to have been recognised decades ago for children who had an ASD diagnosis back then. Unfortunately nowadays this can lead to a lot of criticism and you will get judged by a lot of people even if you explain that it reduces dysregulation and behaviours as it is viewed by many as poor parenting.

Things like residential aren't generally an option as very expensive, not always seen as being in the best interest of the child and things can genuinely turn around eg if their environment becomes more predictable. There is very little money available for carers, respite etc.

AR clearly had issues that went beyond all of this but for very many reasons slipped through the cracks and the outcome was horrific.

@likelysuspect Me, personally, 2. That’s relatively unusual as I live really close to a medium secure adolescent unit and so we do use it as an option. However, most of the people being discussed are adults- AR was 9 days from his 18th birthday, and, regardless, there are provisions for managing potentially violent adolescents. The point is that “asylum care” in the way that most people would understand it is already an option; the issue is who gets those beds and how we define and understand risk.

You're sort of explaining why I'm struggling with this. I am the parent of an autistic child and I am trying to learn where the other parents went wrong. So I dont do the same.

But the choice is still - ruin your own child's life over something he MIGHT NEVER DO or ignore it all! Where is the correct choice? Where is the middle ground? How can anyone possibly see the future?

If my son was a genuine danger to people, I would expect to be told and asked to consent to institutionalising him. That's what I thought happened. And that is what 8 would do. Instead, it sounds like he will be unsupported whilst I put up with domestic violence.

How many children have you placed in a secure unit?

No, they should have reported it to the police! They absolutely did fail in their moral duty but they too deserved protection from AR as no violence is acceptable towards anyone at all.

I feel like I’m repeating myself. We have secure units. People can be held in them for years and decades at a time. The issue is who gets put in these units and how do we calculate and manage risk so that the right people are detained. Many many people will tell mental health professionals that they think they’re going to hurt someone and very few do. On the opposite hand, you occasionally have incidents where people hurt someone without any real warning. Adding to all that, removing people, especially young people, is distressing for all involved and incredibly expensive (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pounds per person, per year), plus rehabilitation/recovery requires the individual involved being prepared to tell you the truth about what they’re experiencing and/or planning and families often have a distorted sense of what’s normal and just want their loved ones home. It’s all incredibly difficult and if you get it wrong terrible things happen.

I agree completely. It’s one of the most frustrating things about Mumsnet for me. Every other thread eventually goes down the route of “contact X, Y, Z - they have to help!” Even for the most workaday and standard issues.

We have truly lost the ability to self-regulate, problem solve and hold ourselves to account as a society. Just constant passing the buck and infantilisation.

It really is that simple I’m afraid. Nobody is exempt from societal rules. And a fundamental societal rule is that people cannot harm each other without consequences. I don’t need lived experience of anything to know that my right to live free from violence is valid. As was the case for those poor girls.

Or they could've taken the weapons away themselves. Again it's this constant reliance on the state to sort out people's lives.

If you want to frame it in a state supported way. The state run a weekly service where they can take weapons away, it's called refuse/bin collection. The parents could've destroyed the weapons and thrown them away in the bin.

I'm not saying that at all. Of course it's terrible and of course they should have reported it straight to the police.

And that is the reason we need to go back to Asylum care. Some people ( no matter their age, colour, religion or whatever) are not safe to be free in society. It is time to put the safety of the majority before the freedom minority.

You're still making excuses, "he shouldn't be allowed weapons, BUT they were petrified". You are making excuses for his ownership of weapons, they were so petrified they allowed him to have weapons.

No wonder there is so much trouble in society today, if people are so quick to absolve the parents of any parental responsibility, excuses for amassing a cache of weapons and just blame the state.

He wouldn't have been allowed to. Even restraint is frowned upon (although of course you have to at times). You pretty much have to stand there, often for hours, while you get clobbered over the head with any object the child can grab or strangled. And the next day you do it again Can you imagine the impact that has on parents? People also underestimate the strength of a dysregulated child let alone teenager - it is superhuman. There are many reasons why a child may be this dysregulated and situations can be turned around for children and families.

I don't think people are excusing the fact that he was allowed knives at all - the first thing we ever did was hide any knives - but they were clearly petrified of him. They should never have been expected or allowed to manage this by themselves, they didn't have the expertise and no one deserves not to be protected. What they did was wrong - it's more about understanding why things led to where they did.

Medical diagnoses are irrelevant when it comes to a stockpile of weapons, carrying a knife, producing ricin, and intent to kill.

And if medical diagnoses are being used to avoid risk management in these circumstances, people need to lose jobs. We cannot have the deaths of Elsie, Bebe and Alice mean nothing and we cannot let it happen again.

It is very simple. Don't allow him to have weapons and poison.

Why didn't the father (a black belt Judo instructor) and former officer in a paramilitary group stand up to his physically unimposing son?

Every time I keep saying the same comments excusing the fact that the child was allowed to have weapons!

"He would get angry if we didn't let him have weapons that can be used to kill, so we let him have weapons because we were fearful".

I could pretty much say "I was worried about the fire getting out of control, so I stored cans of gasoline next to the fire".

Parents have an exhausting battle themselves with very little respite. Medical diagnoses certainly are relevant and each child is different. The reality is that it's really not that simple. Nothing about this whole case is as straightforward as people think it is. If everyone had the lived experience of everyone from parents to social workers to psychiatrists to police there would be a better understanding of how this unfolded as much fault lies in the system itself.