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%?

Where should we house all these children that are being sectioned for life at 13 though? We'd have to build new hospitals/secure units.

The riots started because everyone believed false information that the perpetrator was from the two most despised groups - that he was Muslim and an asylum seeker recently arrived on a boat. This apparently justified people running riot, attacking mosques, trying to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers.
He was not an asylum seekers and he's not Muslim. Whilst it emerged he had an Al Qaeda book (one that is freely available at places like Waterstones), there's no evidence to say he was a Muslim. He was also obsessed with Nazi ideology, the IRA and even Genghis Khan. Basically he was obsessed with death and destruction and any murderous groups from history.
I keep hearing people say there was radio silence on the Harehills riots. This is absolute nonsense and is used by people suit their "two tier" narrative. I live in Leeds so had a particular interest in the Harehills riots. It was national headline news for days! I have friends and family all over the UK and abroad and they were all contacting me to ask if I was OK. What is this "radio silence" boll0cks??

@littleluncheon hopefully this case will throw up how many dc like axle are out there because I can't imagine how much more needed to be done by him for sections came into play.

The people from the special unit didn't feel safe with him and were gently trying to diabuse him from his obsession with violence when he had already carried out attacks himself.

The riots started because everyone believed false information that the perpetrator was from the two most despised groups - that he was Muslim and an asylum seeker recently arrived on a boat.

Worth bearing this in mind when reading on social media un-evidenced claims about his parents, because they are asylum seekers. Some are desperate to still make this about asylum seekers - they tried for a long time to make the Muslim accusation stick by suggesting the media was only putting out a picture of Rudakubana as a child, and he was hiding his face in court because he would have a Muslim-type beard that 'they' were trying to cover-up.

We all know that mental health services are woeful. A lot of violent offenders need psychiatric help. Some fixate on women and children or there is a religious mania of some kind. Prevent should have a psychiatric pathway too as they have other powers and resources that normal mental health pathways don't have.

So instead of locking people up to prevent harm, those who express a wish to commit violence should be given the opportunity to do so?

Indefinitely?

This speaks volumes to me.

He may not have been born when these things happened, but generational trauma has a way of filtering down.

As he grew up and had access to the internet I'm sure he will have looked into his heritage which will undoubtedly had an effect on his psyche.

What treatable mental disorder do you think he has?

"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?"

I have done no such thing.

If deemed necessary, yes.

The alternative is that you volunteer yourself or your children to be their sacrificial victim. You can’t expect other people to die because the rights of the likely killer are somehow more important than keeping the public safe.

But, even if such a thing was possible, you wouldn’t do that, would you? Instead you hope your family won’t get hurt and that deranged killers target someone else’s kids instead.

"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."

"I'd put good money on it that these kids have CPTSD from childhood. Might not be a "recognised and treatable mental illness" (is it? I genuinely have no idea) but people do not grow up in perfect loving families, with no adverse childhood experiences and become murderers."

"But I don't believe that a mentally healthy, well rounded, non-neglected individual would a) access online violence repeatedly or b) if they did, they wouldn't necessarily act upon it."

"The issue here is that absolutely no-one from the outside can know if someone was brought up in a "good home" or not. Things like emotional neglect, parental mental health and undiagnosed SEN with unmet needs would be completely invisible to outsiders."

If you didn't intend for these posts to suggest that Rudakubana had a terrible, neglectful home life, and that his parents are responsible for how he turned out, perhaps you went about it badly?

I'm not saying, by the way, that he didn't have an abusive childhood, but the evidence that we do have is that his parents tried to get support for him in various ways so perhaps the focus should be on how that support failed him rather than speculating on his home life.

You will be locking up, for life, many children who would not have gone on to mass murder sprees. How do you tell the difference? Or are you willing to sacrifice the innocent children to catch the one who would have turned out to be a mass murderer? Bearing in mind you said that he should have been locked up at 13.

The alternative is that you accept there will be some deaths of innocent members of the public.

Is that really more palatable?

And no, you can’t tell the difference between those who will commit murder at some future date and those who won’t.

This lack of accurate predictions is why we have women fighting to keep sex-segregated spaces. We can’t tell which men might pose a threat so we exclude them all.

By your reasoning this shouldn’t happen. We should only exclude those who have already committed physical offences against women.

@noblegiraffe
I went about nothing badly.
Perhaps your interpretation of what I've said is different to mine.
I stand by what I've said and I'm not going to argue with you.

@noblegiraffe
What is your proposed solution to this problem? The points I've made are to try to convey that often mental health issues come from early childhood experiences and it's at this point that there should be intervention.

Yes the parents looked for help but I'm not actually sure what the services could have done other than section him? Which they couldn't do. What do you believe should have happened?

Well that's what this thread is discussing, isn't it? Do you think I started it because I have the answers?

This whole 'he should have been sectioned' thing. At what point and to what end? A PP is suggesting he should have been locked up indefinitely at aged 13. I'm not sure that any 13 year old who is still 5 years away from a horrendous murder spree should be deemed completely irredeemable.

By my very rough estimate, based on personal experience of teaching in a very nice area, the incidence of young children (primary age) who fixate on extreme violence is about 2 in 400. 0.5%. Even if it is 1 in 1000, that’s 0.1%, the vast majority of whom will not go on to commit murder (violent crime, possibly; domestic violence, possibly. Or they may mature to become ok members of society and sublimate their interest through martial arts; contact sports; sports shooting; video gaming; watching violent movies; joining the armed services etc etc.

Locking up 0.1% of the population in case they might one day commit a rare crime just isn’t a way forward - especially because by corralling these children into settings together, we may be as likely to create ‘schools of extreme violence’ rather than decent functional members of society.

You can't go around locking up kids who seem to have a like for violence ? You can't lock people up for crimes they have not yet planned or committed. How would it even work? What would the threshold be.

In many ways he seems to fit the profile of a school shooter. A loner, bullied at school, spends most time alone and looking up material that inspired him. It seems there is a problem with these young men dropping out of society. Perhaps the remit of prevent could be expanded. I know he didn't have material that suggested he had one strong ideology. But the fact that he attacked girls at what was a typical girls event does suggest misogyny and an incel mentality and a certain way of thinking. They won't know for certain unless they can get his internet history.

You only have to spend a couple of days on MN to see people whose inlaws/ blood related family who will continue to turn a blind eye to their sex offender relatives to keep the peace. People ignore or condone what they want to.

But presumably there is a threshold? The interest in violence isn’t just playing grand theft auto (much as I’d keep DC away from that), it’s seeking out and taking pleasure in actual real life violence, like fixating on the video of the bishop being stabbed that AR watched.

Is there some point at which the consumption of this level of violence is similar to experiencing actual violence equivalent to an adverse childhood experience? Does the combination of a fixation on violence and having a personality disorder not affect the risk assessment that you might act out violence? What about family/professional concerns about specific threats? Does that combination with the above does that not change the risk assessment?

I wouldn’t normally be arguing the case for detaining people, but it feels like there is a gap for vulnerable dangerous people and it doesn’t need to be as black and white as lock ‘em up or let them run free!

Then accept that more children will die.

It is pointless discussing this, or any other, incident further. There were clearly red flags, there was a documented history of expressing a wish to kill and there was sufficient threat that mental health professionals requested a police escort when they visited.

However, in order for those three children to still be alive, it would have been necessary for the perpetrator to be denied liberty as a preventative measure. You say that is unacceptable.

Rudakubana had sufficient ricin in his possession to kill 12,000 people.

The sister of one of the murdered girls was present at the dance event. She will live with this for the rest of her life.

By your reasoning 12,003 deaths is an acceptable figure in order for very disturbed individuals not to be locked up until they have committed an atrocity.

We will have to disagree about this.

But by simple mathematics, you are saying that nearly 60,000 people (0.1% of the UK population) should be permanently committed to institutions in order to prevent the death of 3 people.

Every society has to balance rights and risks. The USA, for example, considers the right to bear arms sufficiently important to accept the risk of mass school shootings. The UK, specifically after Dunblane, makes a different judgement about rights vs risks.

It is much, much more likely to cause or suffer harm to drive in a car (think of the 4 teens who died in Wales) than to be stabbed by a murderer, but we accept the right to free movement (regulated by traffic laws) reasonably balances this risk.

We cannot ‘lock up’ our way out if this risk, and even if we could, is mass incarceration of the innocent for life the right balance?

Nearly 13,000 under-16s were killed or injured on the roads last year. We do not incarcerate all those who talk about loving fast cars and dreaming of racing or even those who routinely break the speed limit - we would regard that as disproportionate, despite the fact that it kills or injures over 4,000x the number of children the Southport killer did.

I am in no way an apologist. I hope that, as Dunblane prompted a comprehensive review of gun laws, this event will prompt a comprehensive review of the management of young people obsessed with violence as well as of the spread of misinformation via social media that incited the riots. I just don’t think that a ‘lock them up’ route is viable or likely to result in a safer Britain.

I bet there tens of thousands of young wannabe gangsters who get into the occasional fight and say things like "I'm gonna slice you up". I bet the vast majority of these kids are just trying to be tough and never in their wildest dreams would they murder three little girls.
This is the problem. If you lock up all kids who've ever threatened violence or been violent, you'd be locking up what, tens or hundreds of thousands of kids?
How do you which ones will go on to be truly dangerous, which ones will be psychopaths?