Southport report lays bare the failures of authorities - and the attacker's parents

[IwantToRetire]

The words "failure", "failing" and "failed" appear more than 200 times in Monday's Southport Report

Its findings leave almost no agency, organisation or individual involved in Axel Rudakubana’s life unscathed.

The police, council, mental health services, Prevent programme – none of them took ownership of the risks that he posed.

Only The Acorn School, which the attacker attended after being expelled from Range High School, is noted as having repeatedly intervened.

But the Chair of the inquiry, Sir Adrian Fulford, also clearly believes in parental responsibility.

The attacker's father, in particular, is described as "obstructive" and "manipulative" in relation to the authorities.

It is rare to see a killer’s parents singled-out for not doing more to prevent their child’s crimes.

Together, the Southport attack was a failure of both parenting and policy – nobody, says the Chair, agreed who was responsible for the troubled teenager.

There was a "merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and 'hand-offs'", he says.

There is even a specific moment when Sir Adrian believes the murders could have been prevented, after the attacker was caught with a knife on a bus in 2022.

But no arrest or search of his home took place, leaving the poison in his bedroom and the warped search history on his computer undetected.

The report’s recommendations include setting up an agency with overall responsibility for monitoring risk, to avoid repeat failings.
But there are searching questions too about access to online materials for children, the availability of weapons and the complexities of the attacker’s autism (the Chair is keen not to stigmatise others with condition).

Ultimately, only the attacker can account for his crimes. But for the families of the victims and survivors, today’s report contains the painful conclusion that he could – and should – have been stopped.

https://www.itv.com/news/2026-04-13/southport-report-finds-failures-by-authorities-and-at-home

The Southport Inquiry: Phase 1 report
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-southport-inquiry-phase-1-report

You’re not sure if you would inform the authorities if your already-violent son had weapons? Have I read that correctly? My mind absolutely boggles, it really does.

It's about time misogyny is added to Prevent's 'ideologies we can take action on' list. Otherwise what's the point of Prevent if it's ignoring something so common as a root cause of violence.

I agree.

It's really hard for everyone to work together. IME social care try to do this but it's really hard for them to always get the right people to engage because people are too busy. It depends really - there can be real action at times and it's impressive how quickly things get done but then people seem to drift away again. This is just from what I've seen.

The other thing I've noticed IME is that social care seem to be the agency that every other agency says holds responsibility esp when there is SEN involved.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/apr/14/officials-errors-southport-murders-mistakes-accountabillity

Despite the guardian's general woman hatred, this is a good article with some excellent comments from Vera Baird.

Sorry, that's actually the opposite of what I said. Weapons makes the decision a lot easier.

My autistic son says a lot of things. It is hard to know when he means it, when he's looking to provoke or shock or when he's joking.

Would I tell the authorities if I heard him say something and BEFORE he did anything, just in case? Knowing that he could then be taken away from home, potentially forever, as being taken away from home would traumatise him and make him worse. I don't know.

He would never get access to weapons with my consent so if he did have weapons, that would be an actual concrete fact and would help me make my decision.

As I said, would I ruin my son's life to guard against something he might never do? I don't know but I'm not convinced I would. I would take other actions like getting support and safeguarding him and others myself.

And how does that help in this case? AR had a history of violence against males and females.

Prevent's problem was that they couldn't categorise him as following any one ideology.

It’s not the opposite of what you said, it’s exactly what you said: “I don’t know if I could do that to him. Perhaps if you know he has knives etc, it would be easier but I don’t know.”

The parents didn't need to go to the authorities over the weapons, they could've just destroyed or thrown them away.

I can't believe that this is a parenting forum, and most don't seem to recognise that some of the basic principles of parenting were required here.

It’s about outsourcing as much as possible so parents don’t have to make the difficult decisions and be the bad guy. And that way the blame can always be placed elsewhere. It’s always about the state stepping in at every single opportunity. No wonder all services are so stretched.

That seems a bit naive and simplistic to me. Basic principles of parenting don't always apply to autistic children - they are very individual with individual tolerances and sensitivities. Techniques for autistic children exist - his teachers said so and said they work on him - but I assume that's in teaching as no one taught then to me, I've had to learn my own.

My son is a young teenager but he is already taller than me. I try to teach him calm and gentle behaviour every day but inside I worry that he could easily hurt me.

Also, I'm sure you are aware of DV issues. Picture the parents as victims of DV from their son. Why didn't they stand up to him?

Why don't women suffering DV stand up to their abusers? Why don't they get help?

Every single person in society has to be held to the same standard regardless of anything else: they cannot cause harm to others. Medical diagnoses are irrelevant. You say your son has already struck several people and you worry he could easily hurt you: a grown adult. That is not acceptable, regardless of his autism. Techniques for autistic children may exist but those autistic children do eventually become adults, and it is unreasonable to expect other people to be prepared to be hurt or endangered.

Thank you for these comments - I like your clarity. I follow these incidents very closely to see what I can learn as a parent to an autistic child. I will keep your comments in mind.

Parents have an exhausting battle themselves with very little respite. Medical diagnoses certainly are relevant and each child is different. The reality is that it's really not that simple. Nothing about this whole case is as straightforward as people think it is. If everyone had the lived experience of everyone from parents to social workers to psychiatrists to police there would be a better understanding of how this unfolded as much fault lies in the system itself.

Why didn't the father (a black belt Judo instructor) and former officer in a paramilitary group stand up to his physically unimposing son?

Every time I keep saying the same comments excusing the fact that the child was allowed to have weapons!

"He would get angry if we didn't let him have weapons that can be used to kill, so we let him have weapons because we were fearful".

I could pretty much say "I was worried about the fire getting out of control, so I stored cans of gasoline next to the fire".

It is very simple. Don't allow him to have weapons and poison.

Medical diagnoses are irrelevant when it comes to a stockpile of weapons, carrying a knife, producing ricin, and intent to kill.

And if medical diagnoses are being used to avoid risk management in these circumstances, people need to lose jobs. We cannot have the deaths of Elsie, Bebe and Alice mean nothing and we cannot let it happen again.

He wouldn't have been allowed to. Even restraint is frowned upon (although of course you have to at times). You pretty much have to stand there, often for hours, while you get clobbered over the head with any object the child can grab or strangled. And the next day you do it again Can you imagine the impact that has on parents? People also underestimate the strength of a dysregulated child let alone teenager - it is superhuman. There are many reasons why a child may be this dysregulated and situations can be turned around for children and families.

I don't think people are excusing the fact that he was allowed knives at all - the first thing we ever did was hide any knives - but they were clearly petrified of him. They should never have been expected or allowed to manage this by themselves, they didn't have the expertise and no one deserves not to be protected. What they did was wrong - it's more about understanding why things led to where they did.

You're still making excuses, "he shouldn't be allowed weapons, BUT they were petrified". You are making excuses for his ownership of weapons, they were so petrified they allowed him to have weapons.

No wonder there is so much trouble in society today, if people are so quick to absolve the parents of any parental responsibility, excuses for amassing a cache of weapons and just blame the state.

And that is the reason we need to go back to Asylum care. Some people ( no matter their age, colour, religion or whatever) are not safe to be free in society. It is time to put the safety of the majority before the freedom minority.

I'm not saying that at all. Of course it's terrible and of course they should have reported it straight to the police.

Or they could've taken the weapons away themselves. Again it's this constant reliance on the state to sort out people's lives.

If you want to frame it in a state supported way. The state run a weekly service where they can take weapons away, it's called refuse/bin collection. The parents could've destroyed the weapons and thrown them away in the bin.

It really is that simple I’m afraid. Nobody is exempt from societal rules. And a fundamental societal rule is that people cannot harm each other without consequences. I don’t need lived experience of anything to know that my right to live free from violence is valid. As was the case for those poor girls.

I agree completely. It’s one of the most frustrating things about Mumsnet for me. Every other thread eventually goes down the route of “contact X, Y, Z - they have to help!” Even for the most workaday and standard issues.

We have truly lost the ability to self-regulate, problem solve and hold ourselves to account as a society. Just constant passing the buck and infantilisation.

I feel like I’m repeating myself. We have secure units. People can be held in them for years and decades at a time. The issue is who gets put in these units and how do we calculate and manage risk so that the right people are detained. Many many people will tell mental health professionals that they think they’re going to hurt someone and very few do. On the opposite hand, you occasionally have incidents where people hurt someone without any real warning. Adding to all that, removing people, especially young people, is distressing for all involved and incredibly expensive (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of pounds per person, per year), plus rehabilitation/recovery requires the individual involved being prepared to tell you the truth about what they’re experiencing and/or planning and families often have a distorted sense of what’s normal and just want their loved ones home. It’s all incredibly difficult and if you get it wrong terrible things happen.