Twenty-six happy girls were making friendship bracelets after a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on 29 July last year when Axel Rudakubana, then 17 years old, walked in and began killing and wounding.
Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King were savagely murdered. Rudakubana attempted to kill 10 others, including two adults. On Thursday, Mr Justice Julian Goose sentenced the killer, who had pleaded guilty to all charges, to 52 years in jail.
“It is difficult to comprehend why it was done,” the judge said, calling the killer “evil”.
Keir Starmer has announced a public inquiry and promised that terrorism laws will be overhauled and technology companies belatedly urged to remove the “tidal wave” of online violence. He, too, expressed bewilderment as to the motive in the apparent absence of creed or cause. He referred to “loners, misfits, young men in their bedroom accessing all manner of material online, desperate for notoriety” but not “tied to a particular ideology”; a band of mystery men?
Only Leanne Lucas, the yoga teacher who had organised the dance class and who Rudakubana also wounded, seemed to point out that this allegedly “new” kind of terrorism is one that is many hundreds of years old and all too familiar to a large section of the population. Rudakubana didn’t target boy scouts. “He targeted us because we are women and girls, vulnerable and easy prey,” Lucas said.
Misogyny is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “contempt for or dislike of women”. Men who feed off violence often seek victims deemed inferior to themselves. Since the age of 13, there were at least 15 opportunities to intervene with Rudakubana, including three referrals to the deeply flawed anti-terrorism programme Prevent and several calls from the teenager’s parents to police.
An inquiry ought to reveal why none of the agencies had put together Rudakubana’s claims of racist bullying and love of knives, alongside his autism and alienation, and conclude that just because he appeared to have no political cause, that did not mean he was not a danger to others or himself.
The government has promised to halve male violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade. Criminologist Professor Katrin Hohl has wide experience researching VAWG . She was the joint academic lead on Operation Soteria Bluestone, which has led to a welcome overhaul of the way in which police investigate rape.
She argues that halving VAWG lacks clarity as an aim. Does it mean perpetrators will commit only half their crimes or is the ambition to stop potential perpetrators from taking that path from the outset? Whatever the goal, given scarce resources, she advocates prioritising early intervention: focus on young boys, the culture in which they live, the influences to which they are subjected.
Early intervention in the case of Rudakubanu failed abysmally. His demonising police mug shot may confirm him as “the other”, an aberration, a singular loss or failure on the part of the state.
On the contrary, while he is at the extreme end of the spectrum, at the other are many more young males who may lack an ideology but who already adhere loyally to upholding misogyny.
