Failing to Prevent: Lessons from the Southport tragedy
25 January 2025
This week’s conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the murder of three girls and attempted murder of eight others in Southport in July 2024 has revealed significant gaps in the UK’s approach to preventing incidents of targeted mass violence.
This case reflects a growing trend in which individuals are inspired by and commit violence as an end in itself, similar to patterns observed in school shootings in the United States. The consequences of this tragic attack, as well as revelations that Rudakubana had been repeatedly flagged to authorities, necessitate a reassessment of whether existing systems for preventing terrorism and broader violence are working as they should, and whether they are the right tools for stopping this sort of violence.
Key takeaway
- The aftermath of the Southport attack reveals that the UK is poorly equipped to address non-ideologically motivated extreme violence, which is currently channelled to a counter-terrorism infrastructure not designed for this purpose.
Key recommendations
- We propose that existing violence prevention infrastructure at a local level, including safeguarding panels and violence prevention units, is consistently integrated with counter-terrorism prevention.
- There should be a holistic national strategy designed to counter targeted mass violence, bringing together stakeholders from across government.
Systemic gaps – an incomplete approach to mass violence prevention
Rudakubana’s behaviours raised red flags as early as 2019, when he was excluded from school for carrying a knife and subsequently attacked classmates with a hockey stick. These incidents prompted referrals to Prevent and local safeguarding teams, yet no successful comprehensive or long-term intervention was implemented. Between 2019 and 2022, police attended Rudakubana’s home five times due to concerns about his escalating behaviour. Prevent received three referrals. The first, in November 2019, was for researching school shootings during an Information Technology class. The next two referrals, in 2021, were after he uploaded to Instagram two images of Colonel Gaddafi and had been found researching the London Bridge terror attack. However, his actions were not deemed to meet the threshold for further engagement with the program.
The appropriateness of Prevent as a tool for countering this form of violence is key when considering these missed opportunities. The program was first introduced in 2003 with the launch of CONTEST following the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001 and aims to tackle the ideological causes of terrorism and intervene early with individuals who support terrorism or deemed at risk of radicalisation to terrorism. Crucially it is a pillar of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy – where terrorism is understood to be violence or the threat of violence motivated by political, religious or ideological causes.
Although Rudakubana’s isolated self-mobilisation and heavy engagement with harmful content online follows patterns seen in a range of recent terror cases globally there was no clear ideological component in his attack. His access to an al Qaeda training manual appears operational rather than ideological, in line with its use for attack planning across the ideological spectrum. His reported obsession with violence rather than a defining ideology aligns with a growing trend of “hybridised” or non-ideological violence, where individuals are inspired by diverse, and often incoherent, sources of violent aesthetics and narratives. This is often driven and mobilised online – where young people can readily access violent content which reinforces this worldview, and where there are communities of likeminded others who fetishise violence and lionise attackers.
This trend is not unique to Rudakubana. The most recent Prevent statistics shared by the Home Office show that between April 2023 – March 2024 the largest category of individuals referred to the program (36% of cases) were classed as ‘Vulnerability present but no ideology or CT risk’, although these cases only represented 6% of referrals to Channel – the voluntary programme which facilitates disengagement from extremism and radicalisation. Importantly, the use of this category doesn’t point towards a coherent analysis of the threat, but rather a situation where new groupings of referrals are bolted on to address the ‘everything else’ which is referred to the Prevent program. Furthermore, the low volume of Channel cases resulting from this category also suggests that cases are referred to Prevent due to lack of other available options, and then either closed or triaged to more appropriate social care avenues.
Whilst incorporation of non-ideologically motivated activity into counter-terrorism strategy may make sense when the horrific outcome of the Southport attack is considered, it is challenging from a conceptional perspective and combines a broader cohort of vulnerable individuals with those on a suspected trajectory towards terrorism. Furthermore, it presents a barrier to the effective operation of the system, with implications for the successful identification and triage of potentially risky behaviour.
In truth, this approach has not evolved through a carefully considered strategy, but through the absence of one.
Conceptually it is not helpful to broaden the definition of terrorism. The investigation of terrorism brings with it special powers including increased police resources, funding, surveillance, asset freezing and intelligence sharing. It would not be appropriate to broaden the remit of police and the security services to focus on this broader challenge.
Operationally there is also a clear gap – a framework set up to tackle terrorism is struggling to address non-ideological risks. In particular, key barriers and challenges posed by the incorporation of non-ideological cases into Prevent include an overburdening of the system with over-referral of non-counter-terrorism cases; a dilution of the core focus of the project due to these cases; the risk of stigmatising people as potential terrorists; and the risk that individuals may be emboldened by the label of ‘potential terrorist’.
The Prevent apparatus is tasked with managing individuals like Rudakubana by default; not because they fit within their remit, but due to the absence of alternative frameworks to address safeguarding in the context of violence prevention. Accordingly, practitioners are left unable to effectively intervene when individuals exhibit warning signs of engaging with mass violence driven by personal grievance, social isolation or psychological susceptibilities. This gap highlights the urgent need for a holistic violence prevention strategy capable of addressing both ideological and non-ideological risks.
Building a fit-for-purpose violence prevention framework
The missed opportunities for spotting Rudakubana before he committed the attack and gaps in policy discussed above highlight the need both for the more effective integration of existing support structures, and a revised strategy to counter serious violence which is connected to, but disaggregated from, counter-terrorism measures.
Connecting existing local measures
The repeated touchpoints which Rudakubana had with different frontline services suggest that there was no mechanism to join the dots between his violent outbursts, his withdrawal from mental health services, and his fascination with violent and extremist content online.
One way to help connect these dots in the future lies in integration of existing processes. Integration of local authority safeguarding boards with Channel boards would ensure that all safeguarding cases are dealt with by a unified body capable of determining the best intervention for a young person. By incorporating Channel into the broader safeguarding system, cases can be triaged to the most appropriate support (i.e. mental health services, social care or counter-radicalisation interventions). In many local authorities, Channel will already be involved with other safeguarding responsibilities; this makes it a natural fit which also guarantees wider safeguarding duties can be effectively cross-pollinated with Prevent’s counter-terrorism expertise.
Additionally, local authority Prevent Oversight Boards and Serious Violence Boards should be integrated with Community Safety Partnerships, providing regular updates on local risk, threats and programme delivery. These overarching partnerships already understand that no single agency can tackle crime and anti-social behaviour, and they unite police, fire and rescue authorities, local authorities, health partners and probation services with senior oversight to deliver hyper-localised strategies tailored to the needs of their communities. This will become more pressing with the continued regionalisation of Prevent. As Prevent Coordinators lose central government funding in many areas and the portfolio is subsumed into broader community safety responsibilities, local authorities require closer collaboration between intersecting responses on hate crime, serious violence and radicalisation.
Simultaneously, this structure should be mirrored on a local level to bring multi-agency support to individual cases. Prevent, which currently utilises this national-local connectivity, would constitute one area of these frameworks, but may not always be relevant. This would both retain the necessarily narrow lens of counter-terrorism policy to avoid over-securitisation and ensure the availability of other support pathways for those who do not meet the threshold.
Building a holistic national strategy
These local structures to prevent mass violence should be mirrored on a national level. This strategy will need to unpick the careful delineation between the changing nature of ideological and non-ideological violence, while also recognising their similarities both in mobilisation and harmful outcomes.
In practice, addressing this violence will require the close collaboration of multiple strategies and robust political oversight across numerous government departments. Response must bring together sectors relevant to both this case and the wider diffuse threat landscape which also includes extremism and hostile state actor activity. A structure for cross-sectoral strategic response should include extremism, community cohesion, health and social security, education, international affairs, digital regulation, intelligence and law enforcement. This structure recognises the ‘long tail’ of harms which are relevant to violence, including antisocial behaviour and engagement with violent and hateful communities online; the diversity of drivers, including psychological and social wellbeing; and the closely linked nature of mass violence and terrorism. Effective early intervention to support young and isolated people with poor mental health has the strong potential to have downstream impact on violence prevention. Appropriate interventions for these people will, in turn, protect society.
Additionally, these strategies should be delivered in tandem with emerging digital regulation efforts designed to safeguard young people online. It should aim to both prevent them from accessing material which could mobilise them to commit violence, and operationally create sufficient friction to thwart attack planning. To succeed, online platforms and Ofcom will need to continually keep up to date with drivers and manifestations of mass violence. Violence prevention measures should also aim to protect children from becoming interested in this material in the first place, include digital literacy education.
Conclusions
Recalibrating response frameworks lies in recognising the changing nature of both terrorism – as the Prime Minister noted – and non-ideologically motivated mass violence. The trend of nihilistic support for mass violence has been apparent since long before July 2024. Off the back of this tragedy and the gaps it highlights in existing strategies , government must take bold steps to not only bring security apparatus up to date, but future-proof it to protect young people and the public from emergent threats.
ISD’s April 2024 paper ‘Beyond Definitions: The Need for a Comprehensive Human Rights-Based UK Extremism Policy Strategy’ provides a policy roadmap for responding to the interconnected violent threat landscape facing the UK: available here.