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??

@KitBumbleB are you meaning these boys and those you work with have similar capacity as the man who threw the child from the Tate Museum, so could injury anyone at any time, and should never be unsupervised again ?

Nothing mentioned about the parents.

Name and Shame.
When your sons are out doing that at 12 it's definitely something to do with your parenting.

Yes where did they get it and who paid for it?

Good point about FAS.
One kid I work with does. One was born addicted to drugs. Possibly more with FAS but undiagnosed. Another huge elephant in the room is speech and language difficulties which is far more common than autism but rarely discussed and understood. A huge chunk of the kids I work with lack any emotional literacy or emotional vocabulary and cannot understand or express themselves.

I don't know anything about the Tate man so I couldn't comment on that.

At least one kid I work with glorifies gang culture and has been on the fringes of it before, he is desperate for a way in and his family and all his support system are working tirelessly to keep him safe.

Most of the parents I work with are good people who are fighting a losing battle against the lure of gang culture and the knowledge that their kids are so vulnerable and years behind in their education that college / university/ apprenticeships / paid work is not achievable in their near future.

He wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time.

People should be allowed to go out when they want.
Seeing as it was dark and they were 12 they probably should have been at home relaxing or doing their homework.
Total lack of parental control.

If that truly is the case then they need to be placed away from society for ever.
keep them in comfortable surroundings, access to education etc but they should never be able to walk among us because one day, it could be your child, or your mum, or your husband or your dog, killed by one of them because they simply don't know right from wrong.

The price of keeping people among us who would knife you as soon as look at you because they can't tell right from wrong is a price that is way too high.

Personally, I think the number of people who don't know right from wrong is vanishingly small and that most people would soon know the difference if they were punished and punished hard the first time that they stepped out of line as a seven year old.

However, when every naughtiness is treated with 'love bombing' or a bewildered reading of The Explosive Child then we can simply look forward to young men-and it is mostly though not always-young men- with explosive tempers or paranoia calling the shots for the rest of us.

I can't see it changing unless there is a very unlikely sea change coming when children are disciplined by parents, schools, the police and the courts. When a group of thugs painting graffiti on a park bench run away when they see an adult approaching instead of, as now, fearlessly standing their ground.

Of course he was allowed to go out when he wanted. What I meant (obviously) was that it was sheer chance that he crossed paths with these violent children. Anybody in the area could have been the victim. That's what 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' means.

It said he asked them to move off the bench.

They were obvs looking for trouble and it would have been someone that night for sure, or the next night.

whether they were deprived, had additional needs or whether society is responsible and things need to change… they still committed an unspeakable act and need to be incarcerated for public safety . Setting aside appropriate punishment and possible rehabilitation, no one should have to encounter these two.

@EclairsAndDoughnuts 100% problem is you can look at multiple threads on MN to see why young people's behaviour is the fault of everyone else, but no teacher/police/authority should ever have the audacity to question a child/young persons behaviour for fear of causing trauma and emotional damage.

That's interesting.

A friend has 3 sons, born at approx 2 year intervals. When they were in their early teens, they were always doing stupid (but thankfully, mostly relatively harmless) shit, eg thinking it would be fun to jump off the garage roof and breaking an ankle in the process, drawing a massive picture on the youngest one's back with magic marker. One of them got into quite a bad fight once. Another got into trouble riding around town on a stolen moped. Her daughter, 3 years younger, never did anything even slightly idiotic.

She came to the conclusion that boys go through a phase where they are entirely impulse driven and lack the capacity to consider possible consequences. She described them as being like man-sized toddlers. That resonated with me, my DB was exactly like that. I can quite see that if there is a phase where they lack critical thinking skills but are driven to do stuff, that some of them will do very bad things almost on a whim.

Add into that factors like exposure to gang culture, absent or ineffective parenting, maybe exploitation by older men already well into crime, and crimes like this one can be the result.

(I should perhaps add that friend's daft boys are now boringly sensible 30-somethings.)

If ‘additional needs’ means doing something awful because surely you don’t understand the consequences or you wouldn’t do it - then every criminal has ‘additional needs’?

Tbh I don’t really care if they have additional needs or not, they’re too dangerous to ever be in society again

I live very locally to where this awful crime happened and my son (15yo) goes to school within just a few minutes walk.
The day after it happened police turned up to his school unannounced with metal detectors which all children had to pass through. One of my sons friends set it off due to a metal pencil sharpener being in his pocket so he was taken away and searched.
In the months since this happened they’ve had random searches like this upon arrival at school, always unannounced.
It breaks my heart that we live in a world where my child has to pass through a metal detector to go and get an education, but I will sleep easier knowing that steps like that are in place to keep him safe.
Rest in peace to the victim, perhaps emotive of me to say given how close to home this was for me but I can’t agree with any excuses for the killers, I hope they get the worst punishments allowable.

Oh, and to the people saying it’s the area, it’s the policing in the area etc.
As mentioned I live in the very local area. My son has been bought up in the very local area sharing many of the same services as these boys including schools and police.. and has never stabbed anyone and doesn’t have machetes under the bed, and has never needed police intervention.

@SinnerBoy in the same week that we have the Knife Angel statue and all the amazing work the Brown family have done to raise awareness of knife crime.

My partner is a postman and cut his hand at work when a 6 inch knife stabbed him through the paper envelope it was in. It was an Amazon purchase.

In my town a 14 yr old killed a 16 yr old in March 2023. The 14yr old had a machete.

https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/crime/watch-cctv-footage-of-moments-before-16-year-old-fred-shand-was-senselessly-killed-in-northampton-4429739

https://www.northants.police.uk/news/northants/news/in-court/2023/november/teenager-sentenced-to-13-years-for-the-murder-of-fred-shand/

Yes. It’s both/and. It’s both an horrific crime and the full consequences need to be given, society kept safe AND there will be a history and context to their development into boys that could do this that needs to be understood as fully as possible.

Muderers aren't born murderers.

The more we understand how these things come about the better able we are to prevent them happening in the first place. So looking at their context and their history is important but doesn’t negate the need for consequences.

1% of people with psychopathic traits have severe psychopathy.

This can't be cured, only controlled. We need to get better at spotting psychopathy at an earlier age and have plans in place to help that person learn to live in society when they have no empathy or understanding or regard for other people.

I think we have to do both as a society. Absolutely we have lock people up when they are dangerous. Without a doubt these lads need to be kept off the streets. And you are right that prisons are filled with people who have had traumatic childhoods and whose brains were shaped by those experiences. Babies aren’t born predestined to be criminals.

So, as a society we have to try and understand why. What went so badly wrong? But that doesn’t negate the need to lock them away from society, but chances are these boys are traumatised - hurt people hurt people. It’s not an excuse, and it doesn’t mean they are not accountable for their actions. It’s both.

Murderers aren't born murderers.

A certain number of people are born with a strong psychopathic tendency in that they don't have any empathy and therefore no regard for another human life and are fascinated by the suffering of animals and/or humans as they don't feel this emotion themselves. So, I would argue that some people are, indeed, born with with a predispostion for torture or murder.

What causes that 1%?

None of us are born with empathy. We aren’t born with theory of mind. We develop these things relationally and experientially. Whilst basic brain structure is genetic and therefore predetermined, how it wires up is hugely influenced by experience. I’m simplifying greatly of course.

Just born with a different wiring to certain parts of the brain that control feelings of empathy and compassion. It's just absent in some people so they don't develop it when others do. Just part of the multifaceted aspect of being part of a very large global population of people I suppose.

At what stage of development do brain scans show this different wiring? What’s the evidence?