Unasked and Unanswered Question?
May God receive these three children into His loving arms while their parents are left asking how the evil He permits fits with His Divine Providence.
Bebe King, aged six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, aged nine.
Perhaps not the right time for these questions.
Given all their previous contact with numerous agencies over years, one is forced to ask what the parents needed to help them contend with and help this young, autistic teenager; an isolated child with evident growing mental health problems. What support were they offered? Did they resist? Did they mistakenly try to cover for their son's emerging murderous intentions? If so, why? Were they alienated from the range of agencies they met with; mistakenly believing they could contain him without outside assistance? From an earlier incident where the father apparently intervened and prevented an earlier attack, it seems he had some awareness of the risk his son posed. The police were called to his home by them on three occasions in 2022. What stopped the parents alerting authorities again? Did they know about the weapons he had collected? Did they exercise any measure of control over his computer activities?
Watching the reports today, nobody has asked these questions .... why not?
What can be said? There are a lot of questions that need a lot of answers and, of course, won't get them. The government has already decided that social media and online shopping are to blame.
ReplyDeleteMention of his parents has been conspicuous by its absence. What's going on there?
As with the subjects of the last few posts, it's hard to see God at work in any of this.
I'm unsure about the point that HJ is making here. Reading the biography of the perpetrator (via Wikipedia which is admittedly not infallible), it seems that his father was pro-active on several occasions trying to stop his son's dangerous behaviour. Also, regarding whatever weapons he collected, it appears that he committed his crime with a kitchen knife. The lad was on the autism spectrum, so another avenue of enquiry might be to investigate why there is such a massive increase in this condition these days.
ReplyDeleteBecause nowadays if you are neuro divergent, you can't simply be different, you have to be labelled and medicalised. And at the end of the autism spectrum, you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who wouldn't be labelled as on the spectrum.
DeleteYou also get a whole range of benefits, like PiP,s and additional support at places like university. In many cases it's a gravy train that good middle class parents want their kids on .
Just thinking aloud, Anon. Here's the comment I made of CW.
Delete"Axel Rudakubana, is a teenager with an "autism spectrum disorder" diagnosis. He was, it seems, motivated by an unhealthy obsession with extreme violence, not terrorism (as currently defined). The first serious indication Rudakubana was capable of inflicting harm date back to when he was 13 years old. He isn't a Muslim; he isn't an immigrant to the UK; nor was he motivated by religious ideology. Some, without evidence, are claiming he was motivated by misogyny.
I was surprised his lawyers didn't make more of his extensively documented mental health history which increased as he entered adolescence.
My question: Did the focus by agencies on terrorism via the 'Prevent' system, mean his escalating and very obvious obsession with violence, combined with social isolation, and hatred of his school peers, whom he accused of racist bullying, mean his primary presenting issues were overlooked? His parents were left to cope with him alone when it was clear he was beyond their control."
So, I really don't know.
@Jack - if he isn't a Muslim or motivated by religious ideology, do you think it's a coincidence that he travelled all the way specifically to attack little girls at a Taylor Swift inspired event, not long after there was a huge uproar by 'Swifties for Palestine' over Swift's refusal to pick a side in the Israel/Hamas conflict, and at the same time as the ISIS-inspired plan to attack her concert in Vienna was foiled, and the young girl wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt was 'randomly' stabbed in the streets in broad daylight while visiting London?
DeleteWell, as both the Vienna attack and Ioan Pintaru's assault both took place after the Stockport murders, it seems Rudakubana wasn't influenced by these events. Wass the girl Pintaru attacked wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt? Was he influenced by "Swifties for Palestine"? Who knows what triggered him?
DeleteUnusually for the Guardian, I found this piece insightful:
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/24/axel-rudakubana-murder-stop-save-lives
I'm not saying he was inspired by Vienna, I'm suggesting that all three attacks were inspired by retaliation for Swift's refusal to take a stand on the conflict, since they all have a common target. The 'Swifties for Palestine' movement took off in May 2024. According to Reuters, Austrian authorities indicated that at least one of the Vienna attackers 'had pledged allegiance to ISIS-K, a resurgent wing of IS, on Telegram [a messaging service] in June,' indicating at least some online coordination.
DeleteThe Southport attack happened on 29 July. The foiled Austrian attack was planned for early August. The Leicester Square stabbing occurred on August 12. The victim of the latter had travelled from Australia specifically to see Swift in concert, before apparently being randomly singled out and attacked in exactly the same way. If that's all coincidence, it stretches credulity. I imagine it would be highly likely that she had been wearing Swift merchandise of some kind, she certainly is in follow-up articles.
It's worth also remembering, as we've seen in Afghanistan, that radical Islam bans music, girls singing and dancing, and that the Manchester Arena attack targeted a similar demographic in similar circumstances. Rudakubana may not be religious, perhaps, but he's a remarkable fit with AQ/ISIS's ideology.
The Guardian article rightly points out how many opportunities were missed to stop him. I think we have to be careful in denying him agency in the search for a cause (although I notice that a steady stream of anti-Western indoctrination through the school system is missing from the analysis). Some people, however, are just bad. The violent, murderous antihero of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange muses the question of whether right and wrong are inherent or learned, and concludes, 'What I do I do because I like to do'.
Given his obsession with genocide and murder, I'll concede Gaza may have played a role if he'd been absorbing violent images from there via his computer and made some bizarre connection with Taylor Swift.
DeleteYou raise a more complex set of questions about the interplay between outside evil forces (demonic) and societal influences, the dynamic between 'nature' and 'nurture', and the exercise of free will in all of this.
One could reframe Matthew 19:11-12 to give it wider applicability. Are people born "bad" (certain genes), made "bad" by the world (losing the ability of reason to discover and follow foundational ‘first principles’ of God’s natural moral law), or do they make a deliberate choice to ignore the moral precepts and freely choose the "bad"?
Yes, it's a very thorny area. One answer is the Calvinist idea that the reprobates are intrinsically rotten. But I think that's too easy.
DeleteIf people are born bad (genetically), then they can't be blamed, in a moral sense, for their actions, any more than we can morally blame a fox for breaking into the hen house. And punishment becomes largely meaningless, since they cannot be rehabilitated and retribution is pointless; thus its simply a matter of locking someone up for public protection, if their crime is of such a nature. Similarly, if badness is a product of societal influences, its again illogical to punish the person (hence the progressive's softness on criminals).
On the other hand, if everyone carries the image of God, as I think they do, then we are all essentially 'good', but the image of God is distorted by sin and the world and we become like a dirty jewel that needs cleaning so that its brilliance can be restored (cf. Jn. 13:10). I believe that each of us, deep down, knows that something is missing and needs restoring (which is a near universal religious message). The desire to find that missing piece is what the secular world calls the pursuit of happiness, which is the great driver behind materialism and even, I think, criminality. I think that even criminals are, in an utterly misguided and perverted (in the true sense of the word) way, doing what they think will make them happy. But they are like someone looking for a pint of milk in the garden shed - it doesn't matter how hard or long they search, they won't find fulfilment because they're looking in the wrong place (perhaps why addictive behaviour tends to get more extreme). True 'happiness' is only possible when 'my heart finds rest in You'.
Assuming mental illness isn't involved, I think that some people are born into circumstances or with personality traits that make moving towards 'the good'; that is, God, more difficult. But I also believe that people who follow their own delinquent desires are not, in their mind, rejecting moral principles as much as substituting them for their own. I don't think, in other words, that people who do evil believe they are doing evil in the way an outsider views it. Most wrongdoers have a rationale for their actions, even if that rationale is grossly morally flawed. It then makes sense for punishment to also have, at least in theory, a rehabilitative function; to correct that view (and bring about contrition).
In fact, retribution by itself has always been considered sufficient justification for capital punishment within Catholicism, although admittedly, it's not something that was ever pushed hard by the Church. Presumably, the same thinking would apply to imprisonment.
DeleteThe death penalty, though, is surely retributive only insomuch as it compensates the harm done (the lex talonis of an eye for an eye etc., which is itself a negative law limiting retribution, rather than prescribing it.) Anything beyond that must tip into plain vengeance, which is reserved to the Lord. I imagine this is the reasoning behind the current Pope's views on it.
DeleteI don't think that the Church would sanction punishment merely for the sake of punishment - if it is applied, the death penalty shouldn't be a drawn out affair torturing someone to death over a period of days for the satisfaction of their victims, for instance. Nor would the Church sanction the death penalty for littering, for example, because retributive justice isn't justice if it goes beyond compensation for the harms done.
If people are genetically bad (which is an argument I reject), and the conditions of public protection and rehabilitation don't apply to imprisoning them, then purely retributive incarceration seems to me to serve no purpose other than simply locking someone up to satisfy a desire for revenge, because there's no compensation to extract from someone who has, as it were, no moral agency. It would be like locking my printer in a cupboard for a week because it screwed up printing a document.
I see that Calvin Robinson has had his licence revoked by the Anglican Catholic Church after ignoring his bishop's warnings not to engage in 'online trolling'.
ReplyDeleteI'm not hugely surprised. A priestly vocation is hard to balance with a media career, and one cannot serve two masters, and he has perhaps let his own profile go to his head.
He changes churches as often as his socks, so it wont be too long before he joins another.
DeleteYes, and they all seem to have been small splinter-group churches.
DeleteSome people seem not to understand that a religious vocation means that one gives one's entire life to God and the church in a particular way that is different from that which is expected of a lay person. A priest, in particular, is an icon of Christ at all times, and a career as a provocateur is incompatible with the priestly calling. Reading between the lines, his bishop seems to have given him a similar warning (and, incidentally, why do people join episcopal churches if they only obey their bishop when it suits them?)
The tragedy here is that the pro-life rally he spoke at has now become all about him.