We need to talk about Axel

The fallout from the Southport terror attack by Axel Rudakubana will continue for a long time. Could more have been done sooner, and if so why was it not done?

The authorities may have been torn between their duty to safeguard the public and their desire to be seen to act appropriately and proportionately towards the boy. They had had over four years to get the balance right, and in this case they failed despite clear indications of potential disaster.

Perhaps it was for lack of inter-agency coordination. The Guardian reports:

‘After one of the referrals [to Prevent], it was recommended that Rudakubana be referred to other services. It is not known if this happened.’

A powerful tool for getting experts to work together is the Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), first introduced in 2014. It is supposed to tackle all the child’s needs, with a named person reviewing the plan regularly. Surely Axel had one? Otherwise how did he get into two different special schools? Yet he hardly attended the second at all - what did anyone do about that? Was anybody responsible for monitoring his activities at home and supporting his parents, who have since moved to a secret location for their safety?

Now there is to be a public enquiry and at Wednesday’s PMQs Sir Keir promised ‘we will not let any institution deflect from its failures.’

But the whole point of an EHC is to be wise before the event, not after. They were invented as ‘a lesson learned’ arising from the 2000 case of Victoria Climbié where multiple agencies missed the signs of systematic child abuse and so ultimately allowed a murder to occur.

What will be the ‘lesson learned’ this time? ‘Do your job’?

Doing the right thing in these matters is not necessarily about saving money. A prison place costs around £50,000 a year but a ‘medium secure’ residential psychiatric unit can cost £175,000 annually. Having said that, the projected expense in today’s terms of Axel’s 52-year jail sentence could cover up to 15 years of treatment in the latter; perhaps he could have been made safe within that time - for his sake as a living, suffering human as well as for others to whom he might pose a threat.

EHCPs are supposed to do away with the bureaucratic jobsworth approach whereby everybody does their bit and then signs themselves off. Years ago Looked After Children in a children’s home were ‘cared for’ up to their sixteenth birthday, when they were found a flat and given an allowance - that was the end of that, and the beginning (or continuation) of drink, drugs and unplanned parenthood. Today an EHCP can run to age 25, i.e. shoehorn young people into early adult life and the world of work.

Why did Axel do it? Calling him evil is just a way of saying we hate what he did and don’t understand. Nor does it help to call him simply mad - he was sane enough not to attack strong adults. Neither was he passively radicalised by the dangerous material he found on the internet - he sought it out diligently and other people might react very differently if they came across it by accident.

In part it will be to do with his autistic mindset, for which he has a diagnosis. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is as the term says, a continuum, of ability to use language. It ranges from the awkward communicator - one who understands literally, doesn’t get irony and implications - down to those who can only screech and scratch. At the higher level it may often affect social interaction (see also the related Asperger’s syndrome).

A standard questionnaire for professionals assessing a child for autism includes items such as ‘lacks empathy’, ‘is bullied by other children’ and ‘wishes to be sociable but fails to make relationship with peers.’ Human life is mostly social - how you get on depends largely on how you get on with others - and the ASD/Aspie type lives in a confusing and unpredictable world that drives him in on himself. (Females too - it is suspected that some teenage girls begin self-harming when their peers start competing socially and the former can no longer keep up by copying others’ behaviour.)

Since the outer world is a mysterious danger zone, it seems better to build an interior reality that one can control, to become an ‘eccentric professor’ and be ‘in a world of his/her own with restricted idiosyncratic intellectual interests.’ And so, sometimes, fall a prey to violent ideology and plan a revenge on those who reject oneself.

This is where safety concerns clash with issues of liberty.

Five years ago the Scottish Government attempted to introduce a Named Person Scheme to safeguard all children’s welfare - in a way, EHCP for all - but it was blocked by the Supreme Court as breaching ‘human rights.’

How about restricting online access to some kinds of information? In 1868 a court ruled that reading material was obscene and should be destroyed if it tended ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.’ Note that the principle was that for the sake of a vulnerable minority such access should be denied to all. That said, do we trust the State as censor? Have we not had enough of official ‘MI5information’?

By the way, would that 19th century definition of obscenity not apply to TV programmes such as ‘Killing Eve,’ where the viewer is encouraged to empathise with a psychotic assassin who clearly takes pleasure in watching people die? How much of modern entertainment has descended to ‘glory in gory’? Is that free of consequences?

There are those today who seize on Axel’s case as evidence that we should limit immigration and even deport undesirable foreigners or those of foreign extraction. But we can produce our own home-grown ‘monsters’: 11-year-old Mary Bell, the killer of two small boys, was English.

Perhaps we are looking at this from the wrong angle. It is our relatively safe and peaceful Western European society that is freakish. The ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsa Ali was surprised by the rarity of murder in the Netherlands: ‘Two or three violent deaths in my Somali homeland were considered completely ordinary and unremarkable.’ (p. 45) Even England in earlier times was far more violent than today.

We have naively grown accustomed to a degree of lawfulness and safety that is like an oasis in the desert. If we wish it to continue as people from other cultures flood in we must defend it actively, making clear our values and expectations and insisting that they are transmitted through schools, families and community organisations and are included in the mental furniture of outliers like Axel Rudakubana.

The battle is not on a law and order level but at the level of national culture. There may be clashes as a result, but the alternative - to present ourselves as ‘the weak horse’ - is to invite complete disaster. We have to grasp the nettle.

If we do, we shall find that we are supported by most of those who came here to enjoy not just economic opportunity but exactly those social benefits that we seek for ourselves.