Prevent - there are more children like Rudakubana

[noblegiraffe]

I just read this interesting and worrying article about the increase in children being referred to Prevent but not getting support from them due to lack of terrorist ideology.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/school-prevent-referrals-rise-but-fewer-get-support/

I can see that if Prevent resources are geared to children who are being groomed into jihadist ideology or white supremacy then they wouldn't necessarily be able to tackle someone who just wants to go on a killing spree. However it is clear that if violent tendencies and posing an obvious risk do not meet the threshold for Prevent support, then we either need a different agency to deal with these troubled children, or Prevent needs to widen its remit.

If Rudakubana phoned Childline aged around 12 to say he wanted to kill people, if social services were involved, if CAMHS was involved, if there were enough concerns that he was repeatedly referred to Prevent, then clearly there was need for a type of support that wasn't on offer.

The article says "In the year to April 2024, two in five school referrals were found to involve a vulnerable child, but one deemed not to be driven by a terrorist ideology.
That meant more than 1,000 cases from schools were classed as “vulnerability present but no ideology or CT [counter-terrorism] risk” – an increase of 140 per cent since before Covid."

"Just 8 per cent of all school referrals in the year to April 2024 resulted in a decision to give the child specialised support through Prevent"

Then what on earth is happening with the other 92%?

But who feels sorry for the local white people or is willing to organise classes to improve their English or find computers for their kids?

Given the damage access to the internet is doing in brainwashing children, teens and adults finding computers is the last thing needed.

At which point (refusing to engage with services) the response should escalate imo.

This ^

If anything, he has a personality disorder, but wasn't old enough to be diagnosed with that when he murdered those little girls.

Some people just get off on violence. He isn't psychotic or out of touch with reality.

Lots and lots of children/young people are being failed by the state, whether it's SEN, mental health problems, eating disorders, attempted suicide, ND, conduct disorder, whatever. I think social media and what's on the internet is driving young people up the wall.

Assaults and threats are daily occurrences in schools, between children of all ages. As a teacher, I would love all of them to be handled by police, rather than the many hours of teaching time they take to investigate; unpick; contact parents; punish; put control measures in place.

In reality, we would have to draw a line somewhere, just so police are not overwhelmed (because they would obviously have to be able to respond very quickly, or the school could not function). With safeguarding, responsibility is straightforward - discuss with DSL, log. However minor, it is part of a picture, and many of us log multiple concerns daily. Are you saying that teachers should follow the same rule - send everything to the police, leave in their hands? Or do we also have to micro-scrutinise - is it serious? Is it credibke? Will I be blamed for not sending it to the police if something then happens in the future?

I suppose the good thing would be that teachers and schools would no longer be minimising the issue and everyone would see how extreme the situation in many schools is, if police were indeed having multiple crimes of this type reported to them daily by every school…

@EuclidianGeometryFan

Did you seriously ask who would report their child in those circumstances??! 🙄

I'd like to think everyone would! Any decent parent anyway. Would much rather your child get support than a whole life order for carrying out something horrific

Specifically, to report to the police. Not to get your child support (there is none), but to get them charged and prosecuted.

The parents would still have been in "get him help" mode, not "get him into prison" mode.

"However, perhaps the most significant incident came on March 17 2022 when he was reported missing by his parents and found by police on a bus. Addressing the incident in court, Deanna Heer KC said: "He was found by the police. He was in possession of a small kitchen knife. He said that he wanted to stab someone so that he would get into trouble and his TikTok account, which he said contained embarrassing videos that he was unable to delete, would be closed down by the police. He said he had also thought about poisoning people and or had tried to make poison for the very same reason.""

He wasn't arrested, he was taken back home to his parents, who it seemed called the police on him on several occasions. I can see why they might have thought it wasn't worth bothering.

Ironically one of the buildings burnt down by rioters in Liverpool was a community computer hub

@EuclidianGeometryFan I would've 100% phoned the police. Being locked up would've been the only way to ensure safety to both himself and others around him

If his parents reported him to the police several times and the police did nothing, then how many other kids are there going around with knives saying they want to kill people and nothing is being done about them?

What is the threshold for arresting a child in those circumstances?

Locked up for what exactly. The father prevented him from committing a crime. This is part of the issue - at what point can he be held against his wishes and for how long. He was well known to the police. We simply do not have the policies or services in place to deal with someone like this.

There used to be an intervention service. Was set up for gangs and knife intervention.

seems to have disappeared over the past 14 years

Lots of things have disappeared over the past 14 years.

Goodness me if that wasn't both a massive red flag and a cry for help then I don't know what is!

no one helping you deal with the issues despite repeated requests

But who can help? Prevent is for a particular set of factors. Which he did not have. Either the scope of Prevent needs changing and widening, or a new service needs to be developed (and funded).

I don't understand how wanting to go on a killing spree and then planning and executing this doesn't constitute a mental disorder?

Because you can be evil without being mentally ill. We need to stop lumping every bad person in with mental health. I think it happens because then we could feel that there is a reason people do this, and if we treat them, we will all be safe. But sometimes bad people are bad because they want to be. Its scary. But it is not fair to people who are mentally ill to say that everyone who does something awful, however unimaginable, mush hhave a mental disorder.

All this talk of referral to CAMHS and Prevent looks to be rather shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, to me. I think the more pertinent question is, what is going so wrong in our society that so many young people seem to be keen to commit extreme violence/kill, even attacking strangers? Is it the Internet, family breakdown, the absence of religion, less discipline?
Teachers/social workers on MN: do you think that the rate of mental disturbance amongst young people is increasing?
If so, what factors do you think are contributing to it?

The problem is we're now coming at it backwards, having seen the outcome in this case.

It now seems obvious that a 17 year old who did & said the things this one did was going to commit murder - and therefore of course police/mental health services/social services should have had him locked up.

But there are loads of other teenage boys being referred to Prevent for seriously worrying behaviour, and they don't go on to commit mass murder.
There are lots of boys making threats in school, or terrorising their families, or being sent to PRUs, or not attending school.
Maybe local services already had lots of cases just like this one?

We can't lock all of them up for life just incase they harm someone.

Because you can be evil without being mentally ill. We need to stop lumping every bad person in with mental health.

I don't think mental disorders are the same thing as mental health, which I would associate with things like depression.

I'm not religious so I don't believe in 'evil'. Wanting to kill people from an early age isn't normal though, is it?

@Efacsen

Thank you for explaining

Agree. There is often a "ramping up" of threats and behaviour prior to a major incidence. It's at this point that something should be done but it seems like there's no power to do this.

Identifying these issues in the teenage years is a bit late. What happens to kids at a very young age is imperative to mapping out the rest of their life.

One of the times his parents called the police was because of his extreme reaction to them trying to prevent him accessing the internet.

So it sounds like they were trying to do what they could tbh. They knew he was accessing harmful content online, they tried to stop him, he reacted so badly that they called the police. Who did...not much.

And when the police left, the parents were just abandoned with him as their responsibility - a violent scary adult sized person - what exactly could they have done? Nobody was coming to save the day. There was no help. They had to live with him day in day out and when they asked for help it didn't come.

Not surprised if they didn't call again tbh.

"Because you can be evil without being mentally ill. We need to stop lumping every bad person in with mental health. I think it happens because then we could feel that there is a reason people do this, and if we treat them, we will all be safe. But sometimes bad people are bad because they want to be. Its scary. But it is not fair to people who are mentally ill to say that everyone who does something awful, however unimaginable, mush hhave a mental disorder."

It doesn't come from nowhere though. Babies are not born evil like they're the devil's spawn. Possibly comes from many years of feeling unloved, bullied, ostracized, neglected, unmet needs, poverty, depression, toxic masculinity pushed upon them etc, etc. Of course many people go through some of this and don't start killing people, but I wonder if it's a bit like genetics where several "switches" are flicked and it pushes someone over the edge.

There's a family near me with 3 boys and every single one of them from a young age has been and still is openly violent towards people in public. I've seen the 10 year old "square up" to an older boy on the street and I witnessed the 11 year old brother punch a peer the other day in front of multiple witnesses. The older brother goes out of an evening vandalising peoples properties. You don't have to be Mystic Meg to see where they are going to end up in a few years and I do wonder what's gone wrong in their lives for them to act like this.

This 100%. And I really don't think there's enough focus on this.

Exactly, sometimes you see certain aggressive behaviour towards toddlers and young children in supermarkets and those children are just been shown that as the norm. When they get to school ita always the school's problem and how they have let the parents down so weirdly protective but very aggressive in their interactions on a personal level.