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

You’re contradicting yourself. There can’t be ‘no services’ and yet your job is providing a service for YP.
There ARE services - the list of services involved in his life from around 12 years of age is long. We need to remember that AR is a total outlier thankfully. One whose needs cannot be managed within the services that are currently available. With any luck 🙄 the recommendations from this report will kick start service providers to get their shit together and genuinely collaborate.
Ultimately though, the whole mindset of waiting until there’s a problem before trying to access any professional support for a child who may be at risk of having a serious need is the wrong way round. Every school setting should have at least one full time member of staff who has appropriate qualifications to identify such children, support families and access agencies in a timely manner. The funding for that role shouldn’t come out of a school budget and the school itself shouldn’t be the employer.

It goes back to what @likelysuspect says about the focus of agencies, including the police depressingly, being on AR's individual rights and needs and not on the risks he posed to others.

It's a rot - and a misogynistic rot usually - at the heart of most institutions. This is why you get one bloke destroying the rights of large numbers of nurses when he muscles his way into the women's changing room. The incredibly stupid (and discriminatory) focus is all about that one man not about all the women affected and the risks to and impacts on them.

I dread to think, though it would be useful to know (don't know if the inquiry looks at this) the amount of public money (including staff time and costs) spent on AR. Because I bet it was a lot and what good did it do. Sweet fa. I think it would be a useful exercise to consider whether that same amount of money would have been sufficient to house him a secure unit, with no internet or access to knives, for a period of time, staffed by qualified professionals, and whether that might have been a better use of public money delivering better safeguarding for everyone else.

🎻

This is a systemic issue too. The whole system is geared away from a successful interception. From staff saying don’t stereotype to the police taking him back home with a knife smiling about what he’d do.

None of the systems prioritise safeguarding whoever eventually receives the obvious violent potential.

Exactly. It is completely unrealistic to expect the state to get involved at every point. Every thread I see about behaviour on this thread ends with (usually hundreds) of posters saying contact the school, CAMHS, the council, the GP etc etc etc. Even in a well-functioning society it would not be possible for the state to step in to do so much basic parenting, it’s just not feasible.

His father was obstructional, a liar and completely 9n denial about how dangerous his son was.

Wrt the father, you can’t judo your way out of being set on fire, or even being stabbed in your sleep.

Also, the parents can’t have been completely passive if he had this litany of referrals and EHCP reviews etc - managing that stuff (chasing it, arguing for it etc) is a part-time job by itself!

The biggest argument in our house (nothing else even comes close) is about screen time limits.

No it's not easy but it IS necessary.

And conversations like this remind me how important it is.

I have a feeling this woman will be one of the ones publicly named by the families' lawyers if nothing is done to address her actions (or inactions) directly.

I just think that by that stage there was so much trauma and they were very scared of professionals. It's hard for professionals too - there are no winners in this.

Re respite there are places for weekends and PAs in a 2:1. Either way the family shouldn't have been expected to manage it largely by themselves. It's not a local issue but a systemic one.

You just need to look at the number of threads on here from parents who are “unable” to get their (usually male) children to stop gaming and rotting away in their bedrooms. The idea that my parents would have ever allowed me to behave like that is laughable. It’s lazy parenting, pure and simple. It’s just kicking the can down the road to allow bad behaviour to escalate to the point that “the authorities” have to get involved, and then they can be blamed for lack of resources.

THIS

They're not all hard working and hard done by. Some of them are incompetent fools some of them are actively pushing their own pet ideologies to the cost of not doing their job properly.

And the fact that these people aren't facing disciplinary action and there's no accountability makes the good professionals' jobs harder.

I would also like to add that it's tough on professionals too. They would have loved to have been able to help AR's family.

Except the one who accused the school of being racist. She was just hoping for some woke points.

Completely agree on switching the focus to what’s safer for women and girls. With all the systems in place.

No one asks how to keep those three little girls safe at a holiday camp and all the things that should be different so they were. It should be top priority.

"Most people I know won't let their children now have a smartphone until at least 16"

Clearly this is not representative of society as a whole, otherwise phone bans would not be needed in primary or secondary schools.

Most people I know won't let their children now have a smartphone until at least 16 - we're not going to for our youngest child. But yet again it's fallen on individuals - smartphones should be banned for under 16s (they can have brick phones) and any parent who breaches this faces a £2000 fine. That would solve a lot of problems.

Yes. And a very dysregulated child is also a very strong child. The reality is that you will be strangled, attacked with any object that is in reach, often in the head, punched, kicked - for hours and hours every single day. Every time you say no to anything. You spend your entire day trying to keep things as calm as possible. It's extremely painful and you just have to stand there and let it happen. Help doesn't materialise. You don't even know what you are meant to do as everyone tells you to do different things. You are terrified for your own child - what will happen to them? And all the time you are being told that you are the problem. You don't even know if you are allowed to restrain as that is seen as harmful for the child. If you do restrain you are criticised for causing harm. You are worried about the impact on your other children.

You ask for an action plan. It doesn't materialise. You ask for advice on how to keep everyone safe. It doesn't materialise. You ask for advice on how to safety proof your house. It doesn't materialise. Every day you wake up you face another day of this. If you complain you are yet again the problem.

This is the reality, it's pretty awful for everyone.

I am frequently shouted down on threads where I talk about the dangers of children accessing the internet on phones

Would you lock your child in a room with drug dealers, weapons dealings, hard core porn taking place, violence taking place around them in the room and conspiracy information being spoken. In that room. Because that is what is available every time a person has free access to the internet. And children who fixate on matters, children who have a distorted view of themselves and th eworld around them because of internal factors (ND, MH, trauma experiences etc) will be far more prone to seeking out and enjoying, engaging with, maintaining an interest in those areas.

Absolutely agree with this. At a low level you see it in schools. Children being 'evacuated' from a classroom because of the high needs of other children. Because the focus is on the individual and the options to the school are limited because there aren't alternative placements nor decent support (it'll just be a min wage TA doing her best) and in the end the child causing the disruption and the other children are all failed.

It's not in the child's best interests to be in a mainstream school where the child can't cope. It's certainly not in the interests or the safety of all the other children.

The focus needs to shift towards balancing everyone's rights not just the few individuals with agencies involved. Problem is lots of lawyers (like Kier Starmer) have got rich off the 'individual rights above all else' gravy train and we're seeing the results in society, including in these tragic deliberate planned murders of completely innocent children.

I could reel off a very very long list of women and girls irrevocably harmed or murdered because the 'rights', freedoms and desires of men and boys have been placed above the safety of women and girls. However the failures leading to the murder of Alice, Bebe and Elsie should and must be enough for change.

There’s no mention in the press of two factors that seem very relevant

1. why isn’t there a ban in selling knives online?
2. why isn’t there a call for restrictions on these dangerous websites he was accessing. As a parent if you turn iff the Wi-Fi as has been suggested it can be accessed instead on 4g or in a free WiFi connection in a public place. What do other people think?

Do you threaten professionals though, to the degree they withdraw services? Do you refuse to update them on behaviours in the home. Do you slam the door in the SWs face?

There isnt anyone who wants to provide respite for people like this anyway, who would want him in their home, even if he agreed to go by the way. Respite is either with individuals who would be at risk from him or a set of carers who are also caring for other children at the same time who he would pose risk to.

yes, a black belt

a sports fight is regulated and, importantly, time restricted.
is it very, very different to fight in competition to having a highly volatile individual who lives in your home. who doesn't respond to usual safety measures, who would attack without apparent rhyme or reason

Was there respite? PAs? Did they know what they needed to do in the event of escalation? Are you taking the PTSD on board that they had in their dealings with services? Was the house safety proofed? Were the services offered actually helpful or did they just escalate the situation? Was there any useful coordination between services? Was what was reported on paper a reflection of the reality?

All I can say from my experience is that it is brutal. And never ending. And a lot of families on here report the same thing.

But AR did get services. Loads of them! No
underfunding for him.

He and parents refused to engage. Daddy threatened the psychiatrist so much she wouldn’t go back and was replayed. Mummy refused to let social workers in.

I would also like to add that it's tough on professionals too. They would have loved to have been able to help AR's family. They genuinely would not have believed the issue was discipline, of course they didn't. There are too many families in this situation, they do not have the resources and protect their own pots. Of course AR's parents should have contacted the police, that goes without saying. But don't forget that they had been put in a quite frankly terrifying position for years. Where was their protection? Why is it somehow deemed acceptable that they too were exposed to violence for years and lived in constant fear that anything they did could lead to escalation.