Riot police hold back protesters in Southport (Getty Images)
Riot police hold back protesters in Southport (Getty Images)
ChildrenCrimeLiverpoolSocietyTaylor SwiftTerrorismUK
Simon Cottee
August 1, 2024 5 mins
After an atrocity has been committed, a morbid curiosity often takes hold of online sleuths. As they search for clues of the suspect’s identity, what they really want is to look into the eyes of evil, perhaps believing that they’ll discover some dark wisdom there, or at least some sense of motivation. It is, at heart, an incredibly human impulse: we fear and loathe such monsters, but we’re also fascinatedby them in equal measure.
Then there are those who, far from being curious, want to stare into the face of a suspected perpetrator and see their worst enemy projected back at them. Since the Southport knife attack on Monday, it is this tribe that has been most vocal.
Until today, the name of the suspect behind the stabbing rampage was not released; he is 17 and the law prohibits the naming of child suspects in criminal proceedings, except in very rare circ*mstances. And yet, within hours of the Southport rampage, a number of accounts on X claimed to have seen his name. “He is alleged to be on MI5’s watch list, had ‘mental issues’ and was a Channel migrant,” wrote one conservative “journalist” with more than 200,000 followers. Laurence Fox, meanwhile, blamed the attack on the “national emergency” of uncontrolled immigration. In response, he croaked, “you’re about to see the roar of the British lion”. In the event, that lion turned out to be a tanked-up geezer in a tracksuit, while his roar amounted to hurling wheelie bins and bricks at police.
Within hours, it had become clear that these claims were false. According to Merseyside Police, the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff. We also know that he moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six. In other words, he was a second-generation immigrant, not an undocumented migrant who had recently arrived in an illegal boat.
But put this knowledge to one side — should the personal identity of the perpetrator of mass-casualty violence matter? From a human perspective, it shouldn’t; had the suspect of the Southport atrocity been a white teen whose parents were from Reading instead of Rwanda, the horror wouldn’t be any less horrific. Yet even so, it does matter, to the degree that it might shed a light on the motives (if any) of the perpetrator. Atheists called John Smith, for example, are unlikely to carry out acts of jihadist violence, while women don’t commit incel-inspired outrages.
And of course, in today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power. Had the suspect of Monday’s stabbing spree indeed been white, and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children, it seems likely that many on social media would condemn Britain’s racist superstructure. Which is to say that politicising massacres isn’t just a vice of the online Right, but is fully alive among online progressives too.
“In today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power.”
Merseyside Police, for its part, hassaidthat the motivation behind the Southport attack is“unclear”, that it is not being treated as terror-related, and that the suspect acted alone.Two possibilities follow from this. The first is that the suspect had personal reasons for launching his attack, however outrageously shallow, incomprehensible or incoherent they may seem to us. For all we know, he may have wanted Taylor Swift to notice him, much like John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981, wantedJodie Fosterto notice him. As Kat Rosenfield recently observed in a smartpiece on Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, “the desperate desire to believe that life-shattering violence must have some kind of deeper meaning”, though understandable, belies the fact that a lot of violence is “not just senseless, but depthless, a lizard-brained impulse in search of an outlet”.
The second possibility is that the suspect may be mentally ill and that his illness is such that he had no clear or stable motives for doing his attack; that is, he acted not according to his free will, but in response to some imagined voice, command or imperative that he felt he had no choice but to follow. According to a recentreportinThe Guardian, police investigators are “increasingly focusing on the state of their suspect’s mental health or potential neurodivergence in the years before the attack”.
For those seeking to make political hay out of the Southport massacre, this second possibility is vehemently rejected as a form of rank gaslighting designed to distract us from what they see as truth — which seems to be that the sort of people who commit monstrous atrocities against children are not from here but overthere, where monstrousness is widespread. As one prolific commentator on the online Rightput it: “If they come out and they say this geezer’s got mental health problems… I’m on it… We’re not in a Middle Eastern country… This is England.”
Elsewhere, another prominent poster sought to expose, in hisview, the blatant double standards around the reporting of political atrocities in the UK: “If Southport killer is white = far-Right. If Southport killer isn’t white = mental illness/thoughts and prayers.” If this formulation has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is an exact inversion of a particular brandof Muslim victimology which holds that, if the perpetrator of lethal violence is Muslim, he is automatically branded as a terrorist by the media, whereas if he is white, he is portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems.
Others have insisted that the Southport attack, for all its unique and unspeakable horror, is part of a wider pattern of mass-casualty violence in the UK, where theperpetratorsare disproportionatelyfirstorsecond-generationimmigrants. Is it racist to point this out? It certainly can be, and much of the commentary in recent days has been infused with prejudice. But, crucially, it doesn’t have to be. For example, the claim that black or Muslim people are intrinsically violent or terror-prone is, undoubtedly, grossly racist. What isn’t racist, however, is to sensitively explore the economic, social and cultural circ*mstances in which individuals and groups act, and investigate how those circ*mstances may allow malevolent impulses to flourish.
How might this look in practice? Most obviously, it requires us to look at the nature of an individual’s encounters with wider British society and how or whether it has failed them in some way. But it also requires us to explore the pathologies of tribal grievance and cultures of honour, shame and retribution that migrants themselves bring to their host society, and how this in turn shapes their encounters with it. We also need to probe therelationshipbetween migrant populations and mental illness: if culturally displaced people, particularly those who have fled war zones, aremore proneto mental health problems, how can we better treat them to manage their risk to others and to themselves?
These are difficult and urgent questions that neither the Right nor the Left seem willing to address; with the former seemingly content to stoke white victimology for clicks and likes, and the latter inclined to pretend that the real problem is thereactionto such violence by the far-Right. And in the middle, many are left idly wondering how such an outwardlynormal and introvertedkid could be suspected of doing something so unfathomably evil.
Mired in toxicity, there are surely few more depressing ways to honour the victims of Southport. There is nothing “British” about it, and nor is it “progressive”. And, almost certainly, it won’t help to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
Simon Cottee is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent.
