Two 12 year old boys have been convicted of murder after stabbing a 19 year old man with a machete

[AngeloMysterioso]

AIBU to be gobsmacked and just terrified by this?!

I mean what the fuck are a pair of 12 year olds doing with a machete in the first place??

I'm reminded of a murder some years back - a young man from India who was a student in Lancashire and died in an unprovoked attack by some young thugs.

To think a family in India who will saved long and hard to send their son to the UK to study, only to lose him in the most terrible way is heart-breaking.

Terrible judgement means they say/type/do stupid things on social media. They laugh in class when another pupil is messing about.
They lie about doing their homework.

We’re at a very different level when 12 years walk the streets with a machete and murder someone.

The issue is also any politician that is from an ethnic minority group has FA in common with anyone who is on a low or regular income or lives in a shithole of an area. Rishi Sunak and Diane Abbott could buy their way out of some of the aspects of racism. She sent her DS to a private school, Rishi is obviously richer than most of the UK. Words can still hurt them granted but they are so removed from the streets what do they know. The UK is sort of frozen in a really odd place where policy makers are petrified of offending any ethnic minorities. I have endured racism, it was dire at school and my family were poor as had far too many children but the community I belong to commits the least crime, less than the white population.

Absent Fathers are an issue among some Black communities. People then get offended and say leave single Mother's alone. No they are not to blame it’s absent Fathers. My Mother said that during the war when the Fathers were away fighting all the young lads became totally feral.

Rebusa, I came on to talk about the Violence Reduction Units in Glasgow as well.

I still live in Glasgow and I have teens. Knife crime still exists and there have been a number of stabbings in our area over the last decade or so but something that really strikes me, especially after reading this thread, is that our kids don't live in a climate of fear. My sons and their friends consider knife carriers to be contemptible. There's no kudos in it. The VRUs don't seem to be very active any more but there seems to have been a longer lasting culture change.

So politicians who aren't from an ethical minority ergo 'white' have more in common do they? Yet most if not all went to private schools including Kier Starmer who went to a grammar school then private school and now lives in £1m house and is rich himself. Ethnicity doesn't even come into it. Your comment is so offensive.

I think that there definitely needs to be a culture change, yes. I read about the VRUs, they have victims show their wounds to susceptible boys, or post mortem photographs. Often, the ones showing their scars had been armed themselves.

Obviously, it's not going to stop the rate psychopaths, who actively enjoy hurting and damaging people, but even if they get a small number on side, surely it's worth the effort?

I agree for the majority but some MPs really do have experience of low income/deprivation even if they're not from an ethnic minority background (I see politics through class matrix not race, that's just my view of the world).

Lee Anderson, former Tory MP now Reform, had a proper hard scrabble upbringing, worked as a coal miner for 10 years when he was part of Scargill's NUM, really knows working class lives and deprivation.

Also of course Angela Rayner, very unwell mum, had her first child very young and left school at 16, ascending to her current high position through grit and graft.

I share your frustration that we have so few working class MPs but there are at least a few and we should also use our voice to urge whichever our preferred political party is to widen access.

Yes or Natalie Holloway, American high school grad about to start her medical degree who went for an innocent boozy holiday with classmates to Aruba only to be raped and murdered by serial killer Joren van der Sloot (who then pleaded innocent until recently and refused to tell her mother where her body was)

I don’t read it like that. I don’t think they meant ‘oh this is just 12 year olds and how they are’. I read it more like - adolescence is a risky developmental time (fact) so these boys had that going against them. This will be only a small part of it and I have no doubt there will be a history and context that helps us to explain why and how and stage of development is one small part of the whole picture. Not as an excuse but as part of the reasons why. Which doesn’t mean we just let them get away with it. It HAS to be both - we try and understand how children end up doing something so heinous. What went wrong for them? How can we prevent this happening again? AND they need to experience the consequences and society needs to be kept safe from them. They can’t be allowed to be around other people whilst they are so dangerous.

Ultimately, more needs to be done to tackle the crime and violence coming from ethnic minority communities. Throwing money at the situation is not working.

Black and ethnic minorities make up 13% of the general population, but make up 27% of the prison population.

51% of young offenders in institutes are from Black and ethnic minorities.

Children from Black and some Mixed or multiple ethnic groups are most likely to be in care than white children. In London, it is almost twice as likely for the child to be black than to be white. They are also taken in to care far later than their white counterparts as well as 10 times less likely to be adopted.

Children who have black fathers are living in single parent households, 51% of the time, and that is nationally. The figures for London are much higher.

There needs to be a change that happens within their own communities to break the cycle. Ultimately, deadbeat fathers are making it more likely for their sons to commit violent, aggressive and dangerous crimes in the future.

They're a lot younger now though, when my three and their friends were at university there were some brutal attacks. You risked being beaten up, bottled, knifed, twenty years ago by locals. Don't know if it was racially driven. But the locals dropped out of school 18 year olds thought these posh students would steal their local girls at pubs, night clubs.

There were serious attacks requiring hospital care for their friends at Leeds, Huddersfield, Nottingham, Liverpool and Bangor I recall. The boy I remember was bottled and his face carved up, much plastic surgery. another had his jaw shattered, Titanium plate put in permanently.

Violence against young men isn't new, but 12 year olds doing it is very disturbing.

A man of 33 who lives in my area has just walked from court after kidnapping his ex gf at knife point. He was implemented in a murder some years ago but because of a homophobic judge, he walked free. He is constantly arrested. You'd be amazed at what you can get away with.
It surprised me that Wolverhampton has the highest knife crime. This crime mirrored a previous one. Apparently you can order machetes from the Internet and pick them up from the post office.

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/crime/2024/06/12/parents-of-murdered-teenager-ronan-kanda-react-to-latest-knife-murder-convictions-with-dismay/

There's some background to the boys from a neighbour in this article. It seems like one of the boys was relocated because of gang involvement but the gang followed him as he was able to maintain contact.

I feel so sad for the murdered young man and his family who was only visiting the UK for what would have been very positive medical treatment. Just awful.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/51bb9e64-a80e-4d33-a146-91a732bf3635?shareToken=87fe7b7ee7e6c2476815fb8430843e6b

It's not just about knowing right from wrong. Knowing and acting on that knowledge isn't always the same thing. At 14 our brains aren't fully developed yet. Parts of our brains especially the ones that are involved in decision making, impulse control and emotional regulation don't fully develop till about 25. Developmentally also teenagers lack empathy and miskidge risks. And they lack the supervision ahd influence of parents unlike younger kids. That's why teenagers are notorious for making bad decisions with potentially wide reaching consequences.

This isn't an excuse for murder. Obviously, the vast majority of teens and pre teens don't murder and if one of them does then I think we can say with certainty that something has gone seriously wrong somewhere. Either through nature or through nurture.

It also doesn't mean that there shouldn't be consequences. If these kids aren't safe to be on the road then they absolutely need to be held somewhere Till they are safe again.

And it definitely doesn't mean that the victim doesn't matter. Of course they do and my heart breaks for his family. But the victim and criminal culpability are two different things.

We absolutely need to try to understand what drives children (or anyone else for that matter) to carry out violent crimes. Otherwise how can you ever reduce the likelihood of them happening?

It might be nothing but I wonder if that poor man and the murder victim mentioned from a few years ago who was Indian, maybe don't realise how bad some of the UK street violence culture is and don't realise that you have to keep your head down and back off from literal children and young yobs in general.
This is in no way blaming them - it's wrong and shouldn't be like that, how on earth were they expected to know that a country they probably thought was safe has these issue?

Sadly knife crime is back on the rise in Glasgow, at least in my area. The other week a 13 year old stabbed a 19 year old to death in our local park. Having a 12 year old son myself, who is completely naive and childish still, it’s absolutely terrifying 😔.

So little publicity on this.

Compare it to the Thompson/Venabkes case.

Or Brianna

Surely their names should be released, as in the Bulger murder? I can’t think of any reason why they shouldn’t be named.

I've seen some more background chat. A neighbour saying he had to install barbed wire and cctv to try and keep one of the boys away from his property.

MH shouldn't be used as often as it is to excuse abhorrent behaviour.

There's a few articles on how the Police were told the boy was carrying a knife.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/neighbour-of-12-year-old-knife-murderer-erected-barbed-wire-metal-bars-to-keep-t/

Well the Londoners keep on voting him in don't they!!

If they are going to name them, which I hope they do, it will probably be at the sentencing hearing

Sometimes it is the reason in cases of serious psychosis. If you have lost all grasp on reality and you are hearing gods voice telling you to do X or Y will happen. Your brain has been essentially hijacked.

These lads have probably grown up with abuse and neglect leaving their brain easily hijacked by their amygdala. But you are right in that this is NOT an excuse. It’s a reason and part of an overall picture of why humans do shit things to each other. That helps us to predict and prevent them happening.

We all still need to be held to account for our behaviour and society still needs keeping safe.

It’s both.

If you imagine that all of your closest circle of people are killed by someone, you end up in a complete mental fug because you are grieving with no one to turn to, you can’t hold down your job, you lose your house, you turn to drugs and/or alcohol just to get through. Then you see the murderer in a dark ally. They come at you. You have a knife…

I think we are all ultimately capable of awful behaviour when we are pushed. Our frontal cortex is our braking system that helps us to control our impulses and keeps hold of our moral compass. But in extreme circumstances the best of brakes and the strongest moral compass can fail.

The brain and decision making are subject to contextual influence. And if we experience adversity early in life then those brakes (our regulation skills and our moral compass) get set a certain way. They can be more likely to fail. For these lads you can add in that their stage of development means that their frontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet, they probably have witnessed the adults around them behaving aggressively and who knows what other influences. The Jamie Bulger killers had been exposed to very graphic horror movies when little I recall.

NONE of this is an excuse. It’s just a way of understanding what goes wrong so we can learn. Consequences and risk management still need to happen. Society needs keeping safe. We are all still responsible for and should be held accountable for, our own behaviour. Justice still needs to happen.