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

Thank you for these comments - I like your clarity. I follow these incidents very closely to see what I can learn as a parent to an autistic child. I will keep your comments in mind.

Every single person in society has to be held to the same standard regardless of anything else: they cannot cause harm to others. Medical diagnoses are irrelevant. You say your son has already struck several people and you worry he could easily hurt you: a grown adult. That is not acceptable, regardless of his autism. Techniques for autistic children may exist but those autistic children do eventually become adults, and it is unreasonable to expect other people to be prepared to be hurt or endangered.

Also, I'm sure you are aware of DV issues. Picture the parents as victims of DV from their son. Why didn't they stand up to him?

Why don't women suffering DV stand up to their abusers? Why don't they get help?

That seems a bit naive and simplistic to me. Basic principles of parenting don't always apply to autistic children - they are very individual with individual tolerances and sensitivities. Techniques for autistic children exist - his teachers said so and said they work on him - but I assume that's in teaching as no one taught then to me, I've had to learn my own.

My son is a young teenager but he is already taller than me. I try to teach him calm and gentle behaviour every day but inside I worry that he could easily hurt me.

It’s about outsourcing as much as possible so parents don’t have to make the difficult decisions and be the bad guy. And that way the blame can always be placed elsewhere. It’s always about the state stepping in at every single opportunity. No wonder all services are so stretched.

The parents didn't need to go to the authorities over the weapons, they could've just destroyed or thrown them away.

I can't believe that this is a parenting forum, and most don't seem to recognise that some of the basic principles of parenting were required here.

It’s not the opposite of what you said, it’s exactly what you said: “I don’t know if I could do that to him. Perhaps if you know he has knives etc, it would be easier but I don’t know.”

And how does that help in this case? AR had a history of violence against males and females.

Prevent's problem was that they couldn't categorise him as following any one ideology.

Sorry, that's actually the opposite of what I said. Weapons makes the decision a lot easier.

My autistic son says a lot of things. It is hard to know when he means it, when he's looking to provoke or shock or when he's joking.

Would I tell the authorities if I heard him say something and BEFORE he did anything, just in case? Knowing that he could then be taken away from home, potentially forever, as being taken away from home would traumatise him and make him worse. I don't know.

He would never get access to weapons with my consent so if he did have weapons, that would be an actual concrete fact and would help me make my decision.

As I said, would I ruin my son's life to guard against something he might never do? I don't know but I'm not convinced I would. I would take other actions like getting support and safeguarding him and others myself.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/14/officials-errors-southport-murders-mistakes-accountabillity

Despite the guardian's general woman hatred, this is a good article with some excellent comments from Vera Baird.

I agree.

It's really hard for everyone to work together. IME social care try to do this but it's really hard for them to always get the right people to engage because people are too busy. It depends really - there can be real action at times and it's impressive how quickly things get done but then people seem to drift away again. This is just from what I've seen.

The other thing I've noticed IME is that social care seem to be the agency that every other agency says holds responsibility esp when there is SEN involved.

It's about time misogyny is added to Prevent's 'ideologies we can take action on' list. Otherwise what's the point of Prevent if it's ignoring something so common as a root cause of violence.

You’re not sure if you would inform the authorities if your already-violent son had weapons? Have I read that correctly? My mind absolutely boggles, it really does.

One of the problems is that the people who actually try and help - the good professionals - are not only hampered by the blame avoiding professionals or ideology pushing ones, but also are more likely to get punished when things go wrong. Because they actually do something.

Literally every state agency I've had to deal with recently - with the exception of small pockets of the NHS (I suspect due to good consultants who've had the power and capacity to push for change) - are absolutely toxic workplaces with zero accountability for failure and extreme blame avoidance. A social services department I had to deal with did not have an email address I assume so I could not put things in writing.

Even things like the post office scandal result in no accountability. Someone senior should be in prison for that - vast sums of money were stolen from subpostmasters some of whom still haven't got it all back. Everything takes a million years.

I agree - managers need to have accountability and lose their jobs not only the lowest paid staff members it's the only way things will change.

I'm surprised the staff member who wrote that AR did not pose a risk to others is facing no disciplinary action though. And the one who told the headteacher that she was 'racially profiling' him as a result of saying he was high risk.

I thought he did it because he had some vicious hatred inside him. His parents didn't make him do it. This reminds me of the book We Need to Talk About Kevin, where the lines around responsibility (his or his mother's)are blurred. It is always the perpetrator.

@IwantToRetire I think years ago parents did not cover up for dc as much. They would “dob them in”. There was far less strain on services and knife crime was less prevalent. The wishes of the individual were less important snd the needs of the population to be safe were more important.

We require all services to respond to dangerous dc. Parents too. They need to work together and scared parents really must not cover up what dc are doing, as in this case. I don’t feel people would have done 50 years ago.

Not just them. Staff downplayed, minimised or ignored the potential for that extreme violence.

He didn’t carry out the attack because he was autistic. He carried it out because his parents buried their heads in the sand and did nothing on that awful day to stop him.

https://news.sky.com/story/adults-aged-under-34-twice-as-likely-to-fall-victim-to-fraud-than-other-age-groups-survey-finds-12741799

I think younger people are more likely to report and are targeted more than older people, but they are still falling for a lot of scams despite having grown up with tech.

No problem. It's a brutal system for both parents and professionals. It's been like that for decades, you can't just change things, I suspect it's similar in many countries. Professionals of course get burned out and hardened through necessity and they don't live with families 24/7 so don't always understand the realities. And there's often not much do to help which must be horrible for them. Who goes into their job with the risk of being hauled up to give evidence at an inquiry? It's just traumatic for everyone really and however many lessons are learned things won't change.

In the adoption groups I belong to, the standing joke is that if you approach services for help with really challenging children, they ask if you have tried a sticker chart....

I saw one speaker at an adoption conference once who reeled off a whole list of possible parenting techniques and he asked us which we thought worked best. Then he said they all work - with most kids. But there is a smaller group for whom none of it works.

If you have one of those children, you are well and truly stuck. Sometimes social services can organise residential care but most times parents are left to it.

@JazzyAmbs The thing is, we do, broadly speaking, have asylums-we just call them “secure units” now, and people are often in them for years or even decades. Even on the acute short stay ward I work on we have average stays of four months-and our longest staying patient has been with us for over 2 years. This is normal in inpatient mental health. The biggest issue is quantifying risk. In reality you can’t section someone without a clear cut mental illness or lock someone away in a secure unit effectively forever without proof that they’re going to cause serious/significant harm. Most people don’t want to live in a country where people can be imprisoned or long term hospitalised based on the possibility of risk, especially as most people with autism or schizophrenia live happy, fulfilling lives in the community. Add to that the fact that risk assessment/quantification is notoriously inaccurate and you can see how it becomes difficult.

@Thekidsarefightingagain thank you for answering my questions. I am so sorry you had such a difficult time.

As a pp said the similarities with the Nottingham case are considerable. If a serious incident happens in the private sector then legislation is put in place to make serious changes. What will happen in the public sector with cases like this? We need to bring back asylums for people like this. They should not be loose to roam the streets and take people’s lives.

The thing is, the professionals are working within a system that actively pushes the needs of the individual over the needs of the general public.

The 'voice of the child' is deemed central. 'Punishment' is a dirty word. Practical help isn't at the forefront and social workers are tied up in endless paperwork and targets that are utterly unachievable. Everyone is in fear of Ofsted and being seen to be doing a 'good job' is more important than actually doing the best in terms of outcomes for everyone.

I don't disagree with you re accountability. But the accountability needs to be from those at the top.

This case is absolutely representative of what's happening systemically across the board, in my view. The individual professionals are doing the same as is happening pretty much everywhere.