Is there
an alternative?
This is a long and rambling post – just thinking aloud.
Chris published a post on her blog, 'Always smiling,' about the sentencing of eighteen-year-old Axel Rudakubana. He was convicted of stabbing to death three young girls at a dance workshop and injuring eight more girls and two adults, and was sentenced to a minimum of fifty-two years in jail before he can be considered for release. By that time, he will be seventy years old. It seems unlikely that he will ever be released. He could not be given a life sentence because of his age at the time of the murders, and many are protesting that the sentence is too lenient. Fifty-two years is lenient?
I don’t advocate the death penalty, which was abolished in UK in 1998, although the last execution took place in 1964, thirty-four years earlier. Life incarceration is harsh. Execution is harsh. Is there an alternative? I cannot think of one.
The grief felt by the families of the dead, and the shock caused to survivors and others who were involved will not easily be overcome. The young man’s family will also have to live with the shame and the aftermath of his actions.
The thing that concerns many people is the lack of meaningful action throughout this boy’s life. Born in 2006, he was known to be a troubled character, displaying violent tendencies, and concerning behaviour by the age of twelve. He could not be taken into ‘Prevent,’ an anti-extremism programme, although he had been referred to it three times in two years, because he was not considered a terrorist threat. It was known that he was obsessively interested in violent crimes and genocide.
He sought help when he was thirteen, contacting Childline to ask what he should do if he felt he wanted to kill someone. The police interviewed him. At the time, he had been excluded from school and was later expelled after he admitted taking a knife to school around ten times. In the ensuing years, and attending a *special education centre, he engaged in many incidents of aggression and the police were called multiple times.
In the five years preceding the attack at the dance class, the police, the youth justice system, social care authorities, and mental health services had all been involved in dealings with the boy.
Despite all this attention, he was able to plan and conduct his vicious, meaningless attack on innocent children.
Now that he has been locked away, the Government has announced that a public inquiry will be held. No doubt, ‘lessons will be learned,’ as they always are (not) so that answers will be found so that this ‘can never happen again.’ I have no doubt the people who make such pronouncements are well-meaning. There are good people in Parliament, in all parties.
Goodness knows how long the inquiry will take – probably several years, judging by the usual pattern of such events. The Office Horizon IT Inquiry took four and a half years, finishing in December 2024. The Infected Blood or Contaminated Blood Inquiry lasted for six years, completing in May 2024.
However did the Nuremberg Trials manage to complete their findings in about four years? The major war criminals were prosecuted in under twelve months. Lower-level trials took two and a half years.
I am tired of the excuses made by successive governments for their several and repeated failings. It does not matter what colour the government is, the hollow words and hand-wringing continue, the mismanagement and blaming are repeated. Everyone is always deeply sorry and makes promises that such things will never happen again, but they do. If ‘ordinary’ people committed such ‘mistakes’ they would lose their jobs at the very least. Something happens to people who gain power. They make impossible promises and have to renege on them, all the while casting aspersions on their predecessors.
Meanwhile, troubled souls like Axel Rudakubana slip through the bureaucratic net, passed from pillar to post, with no-one able to take overall responsibility. He asked for help. He didn’t receive it.
Is there an alternative?
*My eldest daughter taught for a couple of years at a special education centre for troubled boys. She was supposed to have another adult with her at all times. She didn’t. She left because she became so dispirited, not by the boys, but by the way the establishment was run.
