LIBBY PURVES: No parent wants to think they’ve raised a psychopath. The rest of us need to speak up too

The Southport Inquiry makes painful reading: mourn once again for Bebe, Elsie and Alice, for their families and for all those injured on that terrible day when Axel Rudakubana stabbed them on their way to dance class.

And lament even more angrily the almost blackly humorous failure of all our anxious, authoritarian, heavily regulated public institutions to prevent this.

Just as we did after the murder of Valdo Calocane in Nottingham, we are outraged at society’s inability to organize simple security.

The investigation says Rudakubana’s brutality was not something that ‘came out of nowhere’ but clearly points to a diabolical ‘merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case closures and transfers’ to numerous organizations over the years. Failures were made by the police, mental health professionals in the NHS, social services and even counter-terrorism officers; He was repeatedly referred to Prevent.

Moreover, he was able to buy the deadly knives without any problems, not from a mysterious dark web, but from Amazon, the most familiar and simplest of online markets. Incidentally, he wasn’t even fined for needlessly inadequate ‘security measures’ (the teenager was said to be ‘visibly over 25’, as if such a look was of any use).

There are parallels with Valdo Calocane’s case; Although he was poorly supervised and allowed to ignore his medication, he was diagnosed with at least a serious mental illness. There, the failure to identify his danger was partly because some box-ticking idiots were concerned about the ‘overrepresentation of black men in custody’.

In Rudakubana’s case, another social taboo left him free to act: although he was on the autistic ‘spectrum’ and engaged in violent online videos, he was not seriously ill. But he was 17; so he was still officially a child and was seen as ‘vulnerable’ rather than dangerous.

As one social worker explained, their assaults at home will always be ‘considered through a child protection lens’. Of course, there may have been concerns about condemning and restricting him because of his race.

Although he was on the autistic ‘spectrum’ and engaged in violent online videos, Rudakubana was not seriously ill. But he was 17; thus officially he was still a child and was seen as ‘vulnerable’ rather than dangerous.

No matter how young the potential killer is, no matter his race or background, we need to stop this from happening again, both on the official and private levels.

If prevention sometimes leads to unwelcome, seemingly unfair questions from public officials, or periods of isolation that inconvenience families at the time, we must confront that discomfort, hoping it is short-lived and becomes unnecessary (the majority of people with serious mental illnesses are harmless, take their medication, and are safely loved).

Some of those who were almost as wildly obsessed with violence as Rudakubana were able to channel it safely and achieve better mental health.

But when there are signs, those with a professional duty are required to follow those signs, and if they don’t, they will be blamed.

What about parents? During the inquest, Sir Adrian Fulford spoke harshly about the Southport couple; He called it a “major crime” that they did not stand up to their formidable son and were “manipulative and harmful” in dealing with the organizations involved in his care. This evokes mixed emotions.

When we first heard Alphonse Rudakubana’s testimony at the inquest and his regret that “love trumps common sense,” I expressed some sympathy: A churchgoing man paid for private counseling for the boy, took parenting classes, and refused to get in the way of social services. ‘I’m the one looking for them,’ he said.

He added that when the police caught Axel with a knife in 2022, they brought him home instead of detaining him and taught his mother about ‘knife safety at home’.

But fair enough, the investigation concluded that Axel’s parents shared the blame. And certainly the fact that Axel’s mother discovered the package of knives hidden in their house on the fatal day but did nothing about it suggests some guilt.

However, if you try to put yourself in their shoes as a parent, it would be terrible. From your first daycare encounters, you hope and pray that your children are well-intentioned: not biters or bullies or apologizing more than once. No one thinks they willingly raised a psychopath. You hope it’s all a phase. It must have been a gloomy loneliness. As I wrote this, I received heartbreaking letters from people who had been attacked by a child and received little support even when they called the police, feeling like traitors.

One more thing. As children grow, you lose touch with their effects and may also lose awareness of what chemicals they are ingesting. All over the country there are children left alone with online horror for hours, staring at screens built to create addiction, meeting local dealers of cheap drugs with pocket money.

Few will become Rudakubana, but some will explode when a random provocation challenges their weakened self-control. The last people who would expect this would be their parents.

We sentimentally love the saying ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, but often there is no villager watching over the village, willing to report and judge. This is not good enough. We must do this, regardless of embarrassment, public discomfort, or the risk of misunderstanding ordinary jovial folk and being demonized as a meddler for speaking out and reporting openly. It’s worth it.