Should the parents of the Southport Killer face civil or even criminal action?

[mids2019]

Listening to the news I do wonder if the parental decisions of the Southport Killer reach a point where they need to face some sort of accountability. I understand that the parents aren't to blame but potentially they could have acted to stop their son and is there not some sort of sanction for this?

No. I feel a lot of compassion for them. The families are grieving and not well placed to be objective.

The inability of health, education and justice systems to manage a seriously mentally ill child fixated on extreme violence is of much greater concern. It could happen again.

Depends on the case, if the young person had stepped into that car under the influence, on drugs, not taken diabetic medication or something like that, and the parents turned a blind eye, then yes, there is a contribution there

Im not sure why its such an anathema for people to consider that someone in your care, under your roof, acting dangerously has some connection to whether you inform the authorities and work with them to try to share information so that the authorities take action.

No one is saying that they are fully culpable, or that they solely could have prevented this or that information sharing and liaison with the authorities may have resulted in something, we know how hard it is to get help from agencies, but if they seriously and purposefully witheld information and misled those agencies that is a different matter. Morally if not legally

I’m sure parents don’t want to be held accountable for their children but everyone else probably does and more importantly so do the families of the murdered little girls who sat through the testimony .
They should be accountable , what’s the point of sorrys when they should have gone to the police , accepting machetes from Amazon , come on ,

Yes, I believe they should have some sort of conviction on their records for enabling this tragedy to occur. They need to take accountabilty for their actions, and lack of action.
Its also time they came out of protection and financed their own lives.

I don’t have the same experiences (thankfully) but what I can relate to is that when you repeatedly ask for help and get ignored or signposted or told they can’t help … you do just give up and accept there’s nothing they can be done.

I only have compassion for the parents.

There are no winners in this particular horrible game.

No I don't think they should. Until you've 'walked in someone else's shoes' you can't truly understand. Plus I'm not sure what could have been done - even if the police knew he had weapons, they couldn't have arrested and charged him for crimes not yet committed. His schools and Prevent knew there were issues, probably social care were contacted too. It's not that easy to get a child accommodated elsewhere and probably the parents felt immense shame that they couldn't control their child. If anything, I'd say it was Prevent that let him / them down. If a government appointed organisation can't help, how can parents be expected to know what to do?

I don't see how there's anything they could have done. The state doesn't really exist any more. There's no actual services. There are only crisis responses. We all have friends who have been begging for help for years with their kids. Surely this is well known by now. They could have reported their son every day of their lives but until he actually did something then nobody would have lifted a finger.

And even then, debatable. Look at the train attack. Apparently this guy was marauding around with a knife for several days.

I hear there are police in London. But here, we never see them. All there is is tax, There's no services.

But car accidents are the number one cause of death of 18 year old men. Maybe parents who buy cars for the sons should be culpable to some degree. (I am an easygoing parent but don't let my teenagers go in their mates cars ever. Its pretty much my only rule).

How on earth would that be consistently managed across the legal system OP?

Of course not

Is a car illegal to own?

Is a car solely used for cutting/killing/harming/dismembering?

The comparison is ridiculous

You can only make that comparison if you had a child (not restricted to men) and that child was obsessed with running into a shopping centre or busy street in a car to maul down as many people as possible, fantasised about it, talked about it constantly, planned it all out, watched videos of other incidents. And then you bought them a car.

There is a very high bar to proving death due to medical negligence, corporate manslaughter etc in court, as there should be.

It would be impossible to prove that a crime like this happened as a direct result of a parent's action or inaction in a specific situation. How would you prove that the Southport murders for example, happened as a direct result of his father not acting over the knife?

We can apportion moral blame, certainly, but to find someone criminally responsible is a non-starter.

And if people who worked for mental health services could suddenly be sued based on the actions of their patients, there would be an exodus.

I was thinking about at least a formal verbal censure by the enquiry. Surely it would help bring peace to the families knowing that the state believes the actions of the parents were morally wrong? I understand there are other institutions to blame and there may or not be disciplinary questions to answer but it seems we seem to have a catalogue of errors distributed over multiple people but blame surely should sit somewhere.

Companies and individuals face prosecution for manslaughter by gross negligence so does this particular situation reach that bar?

It wont meet any bar and there wont be any mention of culpability of the parents, there never is in any of the killings or severe incidents of harm caused by young people. Its just not politically correct to do so, people would be up in arms about how the state is 'blaming the parents', look at this thread for example. No judge is going to voice that

I am sorry but yes the opinions of the parents of the murdered children should be ignored if they are asking for revenge against someone who they think holds blame for their child's death, when that person has not broken the law. They are not in a place to make the right decision about this. Their reactions are too coloured by emotions. . Maybe they can take out a civil action, I don't know about that but I absolutely don't think the parents should be prosecuted no. I just don't.

If they are looking to stop this happening in future they could campaign for a change to the law, ideally at the same time as campaigning for more support for families ( not just parents) worried about potentially aggressive behaviour in their mentally ill relatives.

They are already though. Allowing abuse in full knowledge of its occurrence is a punishable offense. I believe it's mostly invoked in cases where the child dies but not exclusively.

I absolutely agree-I am not sure exactly who they could have contacted and what the response might have been- I think people might have unrealistic expectations of what help might be on offer. Not to mention finding out what services might provide that help and how it could be accessed not to mention funded. By the time all that had been navigated anything could happen

I think there should be an emergency response service exactly for situations like this

Link to inquiry: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c20e8qd5d53t

It shouldn't be a flat out rule and should be decided on a case by case basis.

I think a lot of posters on this thread will change their minds when they read the statements of the girls’ parents. I feel for them the most, not AR’s parents. They failed to act, neglected their child, and failed to let authorities know the full extent of what was going on. They were concealing the truth to protect a violent and harmful individual.

It’s clear his parents asked for help, repeatedly. So I would argue that box is ticked. I would much rather the focus shifted to everyone who failed to step in - all the agencies who should have been dealing with a psychotic teenager and left his parents to it. That’s how we actually make the country safer. Or it will happen again.

I agree. It's a reasonable expectation that if you know someone very violent, with weapons, who you know has tried to commit criminal acts before that you call the police.

I have the same expectation that someone who knowingly gets into a car with a drunk driver is accountable or if someone sees a crime taking place that they call the police.

Gosh why is the first thing you think of skin colour 🙄of course anyone who behaved in the same way should! Accountability needs to be there whatever skin colour is

We jail people who are victims of DV who don’t protect their children from their abusers. The crime is ‘causing or allowing the death of a child’.