Avoidable Tragedy (republished on the 1st anniversary of the tragedy)
What we can learn from Axel Rudakubana (and the Southport tragedy)
Image © Jonny Matthew 2025 (Made with DALL-E)
If you’re a free subscriber to Jonny’s Substack and would like to support the work please consider becoming as a paying subscriber (it’s only a fiver)…
Just before midday, on 29th July 2024, three little girls were killed while attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga event in Southport, North West England. Two adults were very seriously injured and eight other children, five of them critically.
Introduction
The sentencing of Axel Rudakubana this week has provoked the usual pantheon of incredulity and rage - and all points in between. Of course it did. The utter tragedy his actions visited on three little girls, their families, injured and traumatised friends, teachers and neighbours echoed around the nation.
On hearing what he did, it felt like the whole country took a sharp intake of breath - it was so crass, pointless, alien to our humanity and utterly devastating.
Understandable Outrage
As always in such cases, the media, justice system and public ‘vox pop’ focus is on the killer, the killings themselves and whether or not he got what he deserved.
On this last point, with tiresome inevitability, the broad conclusion is that he…
…deserved to be sentenced as an adult, but wasn’t
…deserved a whole life sentence, but only got 52 years, and
…he deserved to die, but he didn’t
And on it goes.
The anger is completely understandable; as is the need to find some semblance of meaning and to comprehend who would do such a thing. Sadly, all of this also drives the need for revenge - or, as people prefer to call it, ‘justice.’
Aside of whether it actually is justice that we seek, we all want to feel the episode is somehow closed with as much dignity and fairness as possible, given the horrors involved.
Othering
Axel Rudakubana’s actions on the 29th July 2024 were characterised by a lethal insanity of the sort that addles the minds of ordinary humans. It’s the very inhumanity of it that forces us to see him as ‘other’ than us - different, alien, ontologically distinct; a species apart, if you like.
Understandably, we want to make the chasm between how we see ourselves and someone ‘like him’, as wide as we can. We need to feel some distance between him and what he did, and us - because we’d never do that.
Of course we wouldn’t.
Any sound-minded decent person would agree, not least because we can’t get our heads around why someone would set out to kill children. But that’s exactly my point; our shock and outrage at what he did means we have to take refuge in believing that someone like that can’t possibly be anything like us; ergo, he must be something or someone other.
But I don’t think it’s good enough to dismiss what he did, to dismiss him, with sneering and contemptuous assertions that he’s mad; to ‘monsterfy’ him, if you will. Or even to simplistically depict him summarily as a ‘knifeman’ on a ‘rampage.’
The most published image of Rudakubana - taken after his arrest by Merseyside Police* - is one that seems to visually confirm his otherness and, perhaps incidentally, helps to justify the derision. Anyone looking like that, clearly isn’t anything like me.
We need to do this distancing. We need the space between us and him. The dissonance between what he did and how we see ourselves as people, is too great, too unbearable; so we widen the gap by othering. For all it’s tragic sadness, this is a natural and necessary psychological heuristic to keep us from being tarnished by anything we and he might share.
The elephant in the room
But obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that. Once the media hype and tabloid sensationalism has died down and the press wagon has moved on to the next thing, something will have to be done.
Even a cursory reading of the press coverage, highlights enough markers of concern for us to ask wider questions about ‘why’ it happened and what might be needed to improve responses to similar situations in future. But also on an individual level, we need to know what might have helped this boy such that the events of last summer were averted.
The presence of so many markers of concern should energise us to question not only the subjective chaos of a very troubled mind, but why we couldn’t prevent their escalation into such an unmitigated tragedy.
For example, things known about Rudakubana include:
Anger issues
Agoraphobia
Selective mutism
Obsession with homicidal dictators (Hitler, Genghis Khan)
Thinking, talking about and studying violence
Calling Childline
Being a victim of racist bullying
Feeling frightened and carrying a knife
Being ‘immediately and permanently’ excluded from school for admitting he carried a knife
Returning to school two months later to assault another child
Living with an autistic spectrum condition
Being referred to the Prevent programme - 3 times
Previous convictions for assault and possession of a bladed article
Local YOT involvement
Several incidents of Police involvement between May 2019 and October 2022…
…including his parents calling the police due to concerns about his behaviour…
…including a near miss when he tried to return to school with a knife
Assaulting his father and damaging the family car when his parents took his computer away
Numerous police calls to the multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH)
And on it goes
Clearly this is not a child (and he was a child) that just upped and did something terrible out-of-the-blue. There was a long, clear and checkered history that led up to it all.
Avoidable, but not yet…
The murders of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar were unspeakably tragic and desperate. Perhaps the most irksome and utterly frustrating thing for those of us who work with serious crime involving children, is that they were avoidable, too.
‘The amount of information known before the murders about Rudakubana's violent obsessions has prompted serious questions over whether more could have been done to stop him.’ (BBC 22/1/25 - link)
Most weeks, my colleagues and I come across children who, if they aren’t contained, assessed and treated could very well go on to harm others - some of them very seriously.
The problem is, it seems to me, that there just isn’t the provision in our system to do the containing, so that the necessary stability, safety and professional expertise can be brought to bear.
Where do you contain, assess and treat a child who:
Has not (yet!) committed an offence serious enough to be remanded, but might harm others if they’re not helped?
Is not obviously mentally ill such that a section under the Mental Health Act could apply? Or
Who wouldn’t pass muster in the Family Court for a secure welfare order?
Many very troubled kids just fall between the stools of criminal, mental health and welfare responses, and so can’t be secured for the necessary stability to be put in place to allow a good assessment and planned response. There just isn’t the provision - legal or financial - to safely and securely hold kids like this so they can be properly assessed for the help they need.
So, just like Axel Rudakubana, there can be a pantheon of issues, concerns, markers and risky features on display, but there is no provision to address them.
Sorting THAT out is the priority - perhaps the most pressing social policy issue for troubled kids in the UK right now.
FINAL THOUGHTS
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Axel Rudakubana was a monster or a born killer.
More likely, this was an extremely troubled child, seemingly for most if not all of his childhood, who didn’t get the help he needed, when he needed it - in time to prevent the catastrophe in Southport.
While we grieve with the victim’s families and deal with our need to ‘other’ the killer lest we’re tarnished by our shared inhumanity, let’s ask the question that really matters and seek to change the system to answer it:
Why was a child this troubled not able to get the help he needed to fulfil his potential?
And, at the same time, let’s hope that if we ever get desperate, really desperate, we get the help we need. Because I suspect that if I’d lived the childhood that he lived, with the problems and challenges he faced, I might not be that different after all…
See you in the next one!
🎧 Listen on SPOTIFY here
More information:
WEB ARTICLE: BBC Online article about ‘red flags’ being repeatedly missed (link)
LISTENING: The BBC Reith Lectures 2024 by Dr Gwen Adshead - Lecture #4: Can We change Violent Minds? (link - the entire series is quite superb!)
PREVIOUS BLOG: Imprisoning Kids: Why Do We Punish When we Could Help?? (link)
PREVIOUS BLOG: Punishment Doesn’t Work…For Troubled Kids. Do This Instead (link)
* I took the decision not to publish the image here - it felt like I’d be playing into, even encouraging, the ‘evil’ mythic status and associated othering of a very needy 17 year old boy.
Subscribe & Follow?
You can join Jonny’s mailing list here. Your information is safe and you can unsubscribe anytime very easily.
If you want these posts sent straight to your inbox, click the blue subscribe button below.
You can also “Like” this site on Facebook or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. (NB: my Pinterest account was hacked and is now permanently offline).
Really looking forward to this & enjoying the reading & research in preparation. It’ll be online between 4-8pm UK time on Thursday 27th Feb. If you fancy it, register here: https://safersociety.org/understanding-adhd-in-adolescents-who-display-harmful-sexual-behavior/
©️ Jonny Matthew 2025