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%?

Can’t remember who asked but yes obviously you wouldn’t expect every scuffle to be reported to the police but certainly teenagers physically assaulting people should be.

He had assaulted someone with planning with a weapon (hockey stick) for which he should have been arrested and charged and some form of punishment applied. There are other options than detention such as electronic tagging, mandatory attendance of youth offenders services, probation services etc. Whether it would have prevented this tragedy or not aside, criminal behaviour needs to see young offenders arrested and charged.

Also whilst nearly every violent offender can tell of an abusive childhood it doesn’t mean a bit of counselling can redeem them and stop them being a serious threat to others. Part of the purpose of a criminal justice system and prison sentences is protecting the public. This is alongside its purpose as a deterrent and rehabilitation.

The idea that dangerous people just need help and understanding is naive

I completely agree. A lone killer with an obsession with violence is shocking, yes, but it was the subsequent much larger scale rioting and lawlessness that made me feel that something fundamental about British life was broken in a way that was utterly alien and appalling to me.

Oh and the difference between personality disorders and mental illness is that they are not treatable and they will remain for life.

Many people with PD don’t engage in criminal action obviously but those who do are more likely to have no remorse or empathy for their victims or take any accountability.

The vast majority of those will be housed in prison. The ones I saw in a forensic unit weren’t there because they could be cured but because they were too dangerous for even the prison population and staff and needed constant surveillance and high staff to resident ratios with specialised training for those staff and alarm systems everywhere. These superficially charming and clearly not ill or psychotic men who just happened to eg. enjoy raping, torturing and murdering women.

People seem to be trying to pin this on his parents as being neglectful or abusive. They called the police on him multiple times. His dad stopped him going back to his school to attack. He had an EHCP. He was under CAMHS. These things all suggest his parents had tried to get him help and stop him doing terrible things.

Massive police failures but if they’re trained to not prosecute youngsters or have to be involved in any system of follow up and intervention it’s not police officers fault and needs changes in policy and legislation.

Yes I know. I doubt we'll ever know whether he was just "wired wrong" or a product of his childhood, or both.
I've seen loads of people say his dad was wanted in Rwabda for genocide crimes but I've actually seem no evidence of this. Also people saying Keir Starner let his family into the country but I'm sure they came 20 odd years ago. So much misinformation around.

I've not seen anyone trying to pin this on his parents

We have seen it here on the site on many occasions. It's heartbreaking and terrifying to witness what the parents are going through, knowing it's going to end in disaster.

Even if that were true, they're not acting on it to anywhere near the same extent, eg MI5 watch list.

I don’t know anything about the area so apologies for a naive question. When you’re working with people like this is it possible to redirect them eg if they are fixated on violence and viewing it can this be shifted to something else?

If you can’t be sectioned with a non treatable personality disorder I’m wondering whether there might be something about a risk based approach eg if you have a personality disorder and are consuming a lot of violent porn or images of killing that probably increases the likelihood you might act on it? Would some kind of early intervention work? So that the fixation which I assume is linked to the personality disorder be redirected? After all not everyone with a personality disorder is violent.

It seems many of those allegations weren't false at all.

The most violent riots seem to have been in Birmingham where gangs armed with machetes were rampaging through the streets, whipped up by what really was false information, and one man was lucky to survive after being beaten up by a mob of about 50. But nothing is said about those. There's also radio silence about Harehills.

I do think a lot of the outrage is because it's easy, they were working-class white men so attacking them is much gentler on liberal principles than facing up to a far bigger horror where the perpetrator wasn't white. Myself, I condemn all the riots but I also think having a sense of proportion is important.

The definition of mental illness is too narrow. I understand why clinicians would want this, but it doesn’t translate well into the real world. Personality disorders may not be curable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a mental illness - I’m using this in the way the man on the Clapham omnibus would interpret it.

Normal people don’t think stabbing and beheading children is a good idea. We see that not only is it evil, it also serves no good purpose. Terrorists who target children know that those they kill are not the ones responsible for whatever laws they disagree with. They do it out of pure spite. The motivations of terrorists are usually not considered a mental illness but in reality they are. Sane people don’t plan and carry out mass murders of civilians.

If someone is being stabbed the victim doesn’t look at the attacker and consider whether they’re being injured due to mental illness or due to adherence to a dodgy ideology. They just see evil.

We used to have internment laws in the U.K. During WWs1&2 foreign nationals were locked up or detained in camps because it was considered they might pose a risk to society. They were detained pre-emptively, the authorities didn’t wait for them to commit a crime first. And many perfectly innocent people were caught up in this. It wasn’t fair to them on an individual level but back then the rights and safety of the rest of the population trumped those of the individual who potentially posed a risk. I believe this law was abolished and replaced with our current terrorist laws.

Some people are a ticking time bomb. For whatever reason they are likely to commit acts of extreme violence against innocent members of the public. This may be due to mental illness (in the clinical sense) or it may be due to a personality disorder. It really doesn’t matter which. At the moment it seems our laws state that a small portion of the population is expendable in that a murder or violent assault must occur before we permit the removal of the assailant from society.

There were so many red flags over many years about Axel Rudakubana that now, with hindsight, it seems beyond belief that he was not detained before. But no authority seems to have been in a position to remove him from circulation for public safety. And he won’t be an isolated case, there will be other kids like him wandering freely on the streets right now. Keep your fingers crossed that you’re nowhere in the vicinity when they do eventually go berserk, because politically there seems little will to protect the public in advance.

We need a radical overhaul of our public safety laws. It isn’t enough to say that only those wedded to political or religious ideologies should be the focus of intervention. Individuals who, from a young age, show a propensity for or admiration of extreme violence need to be locked up for the safety of everyone else.

Harping on about their human rights when they haven’t yet committed a crime no longer washes - what about the human rights of their victims? Is it right the state allows them to be sacrificed?

A huge problem is that because of the amount of people the NHS has to deal with, there seems to be no personalised care.

I know many families whose children/young people have been referred to CAMHS and because of their autism/anxiety/other mental health issues, they may be too anxious to attend appointments. Some might also just have the "fuck this I'm not going to that" attitude. Others might have a lack of executive functioning and don't remember when/where appt is, forget to go etc, etc.

This then gets classed as "won't engage with services" and they are discharged from the service.

A lot of the time the people who need to engage with MH services the most are the ones who ended up being discharged.

Definitely an element of public services being a mess.

Agree not really on this thread but twitter is awash with it and MNHQ quickly deleted a thread about it yesterday - have also seen it mentioned on other threads about AR

Pressed post to quickly. I mean public services being as mess has some bearing as well as there being some kind of gap around services for a person like this. If the services that saw him had more discretion and time and could act in a more personalised way. It must be frustrating to be a professional in these circumstances.

This is utterly astonishing and really highlights how broken our society is. So many times, so many people - including him - cried out for help for him. Scores of people knew that he had hideous problems - but still he was able to kill people because not enough was done.

With this type of failure, we can only expect more incidents like this.

It seems sectioning is the only answer and should have been done at 13 - hindsight is a wonderful thing and how many parents of these types of 13 year olds would allow it.

But you couldn't section him for life if he hadn't committed a crime and if he was being sectioned for a period of time then it seems like there needs to be a treatment plan that he could follow.

So I guess the question there is 'what is the treatment plan?'. That's why people were trying to refer him to Prevent, which is the 'treatment' for radicalisation, but he wasn't being radicalised into a particular ideology so Prevent said 'not us'.

Certainly he seems to have been watching a lot of violent content on the internet, but that may be a symptom rather than a cause.

@SallyWD This is what I know from verified sources

AR's family are from the Tutsi tribe who were the victims of the 1994 genocide by Hutu extremists - it was a very close up and personal bloody event involving neighbours/friends frenzied killing one another with machetes and long knives

AR's family seem to have been related to the Tutsi political elite including the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame - one source reports that it was the assassination of AR's grandfather which triggered the genocidal killing

AR's parents fled to Uganda in the lead up to the genocide but his father re-entered Rwanda to fight for the Tutsi resistance - don't know if this involved war crimes there has been much mutual re-crimination following the genocide

After the genocide AR's parents were granted asylum in the UK and settled with other Rwandan asylum seekers in Cardiff - AR's older brother was born there then AR about 2 years later.

The family is more than likely to have lost many family and friends as 800k Tutsi people died in the massacres

there doesn't seem to be any foundation to thde

it's unknown how much the genocide was discussed in AR's home community school whether it was openly discussed or a forbidden subject or what AR's understanding was of his horrific heritage thro' the lens of his social-communication disorder-

It's also unknown why the family moved away from the Rwandan community in Cardiff to a small Lancs village outside Southport

.

but still he was able to kill people because not enough was done.

What could have been done though?

You can't change what turns people on. AR found extreme violence was the thing that made him tick. He simply enjoyes it.

No amount of CAMHS intervention or police intervention could change the fact that at a fundamental level AR is simply an incredibly bad individual. Throughout history we have examples of men just like him, going back to Roman emperors and before. Even in a utopia these individuals will pop up every now and then.

You have repeatedly suggested that to have committed this crime he must have been neglected or abused and that children from loving families don't turn out like this.

Is that not trying to pin it in his parents?

Meecrowahvey · Yesterday 17:10
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Why does wanting to kill peope mean a person must be insane? Some people take pleasure from gardening or crochet. Some people take pleasure from inflicting violence and pain upon others

You think that people who take pleasure from inflicting violence and pain upon others are not insane?

@BaronessEllarawrosaurus but he was seen by service? He had specialist support from place where excluded children go, they were terrified..
By the time he was accessing Al queda stuff he had his prevent case closed so apparently no one looked at it.

You think that people who take pleasure from inflicting violence and pain upon others are not insane?

Why does wanting to do those things mean a person isn't sane? Many people enjoy those things in our society, just at a lower level (bdsm/boxing/mma etc).