The events that took place in Southport earlier this week are almost too horrific to put into words: a 17-year-old male carried out a ‘ferocious’ knife attack on a Taylor Swift themed dance class for children. 11 children and two adults were stabbed. At time of writing, three of the girls have died (Bebe King, six; Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven; and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine) and five children, aged between six- and 10-years-old, are in a critical condition, as are both the adult women who police say tried to protect the children. The attacker was apprehended and police are not looking for anyone else.
The profound horror of the incident operates on multiple levels. The age of the victims is especially devastating - the magic and potential of those bright young lives cruelly robbed. But there is an additional biting sorrow in what the victims were doing at that time. Is there any greater expression of girlhood innocence than dancing to Taylor Swift? When their parents booked the class, they would have known their daughters’ excitement, and their devotion to their hero. They would have known that Swift is arguably the world’s most famous champion of girlhood, making them feel seen, special and safe.
But nobody could have imagined the horror. To say it’s every parent's worst nightmare is an understatement. How will those parents ever comprehend what they discovered? How will the survivors live with the trauma? How can any of those involved ever recover?
The first response of those on the outside is grief and horror, our hearts break as we pull small bodies in closer, smell their hair harder, tell them we love them one more time. We feel sick to our stomachs, our brains glitching as opposing images jutt up against one another: little girls, pink, glitter, Taylor Swift, screams, blood, limp bodies, crying paramedics. We wipe away tears we don’t feel we have the right to shed. It’s too awful to think about, we text each other. Except we can’t think about anything else.
In time our attention turns to the only element of the incident that didn’t come as a shock: male violence. This time a 17-year-old boy. Frustrating, agonisingly, despairingly - here we are again.
Right now, we do not know the motivation but the facts are stark. Male violence against women and girls is a ‘national emergency’, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council who said they will respond to the threat on the same level as terrorism. Only last month, a man walked into his ex-girlfriend’s family home and murdered her, her sister and her mother with a crossbow. We know that most victims know the perpetrators. We know that young boys are lonelier than ever, being drawn to dangerous online voices that offer the validation they can’t find in the real world. We know that mental health services are underfunded and inadequate.
What more will it take, we have said, more times than we can bear to remember.
Mostly, however, we know that we are devastated and exhausted once again, or is it just permanently now, flaring up with each worsening case we read? And while we can’t understand how such deep misogyny can swell in a boy so young, and we can’t compute a world where little girls are stabbed to death, we can not ignore that male violence against women and girls is an epidemic. And while we can’t believe that the peculiarly American horror of the mass killing of children has arrived on our shores, we are sick and tired of living in a world where women and girls are not safe because of the way men and boys behave. What more will it take, we have said, more times than we can bear to remember.
The Southport attack is less predictable than many of the instances of male violence that make headlines. The senseless devastation of such innocence is incomprehensible, and in the UK, thankfully rare. The lightness of a sunny Monday morning dance party turned dark with death and trauma is not something we know, or know how to respond to. But we do know a truth in our bones, something that did feel familiar in our chests when we first read those harrowing details. Women and girls are still not safe - even when they should be in the safest places of all.