The Southport Stabbings:
When did children become acceptable targets for political violence?
Elsie Dot Stancombe (left), Alice Dasilva Aguiar (middle), and Bebe King (right). Photo image courtesy of Merseyside Police.
During a knife attack at a “Taylor Swift-themed” yoga dance party, three young girls died, and eight more children suffered critical injuries in the seaside British town of Southport on Monday, July 29th.
The deceased children are six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar. The perpetrator also severely injured two adults – yoga teacher Leanne Lucas – who organized the event, and Jonathan Hayes, a man who tried to stop the assailant. A 17-year-old male, who is unnamed because of his age, carried out the attack.
Although British law enforcement officials are saying that the attack is not terror-related, far-right-wing political protesters clashed with police in Southport on Tuesday. The riot happened after numerous social media instigators spread rumors and unconfirmed reports that the attacker was either an undocumented migrant, an asylum seeker from Syria, or a radical Muslim.
According to police, protesters threw bricks at a local mosque, hurled debris at officers, and set police vehicles and resident cars on fire.
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Southport yoga teacher Leanne Lucas, who was running a Taylor Swift-themed dance event, was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant on Monday, July 29th. Photo image courtesy of Merseyside Police.
Merseyside police said thirty-nine police officers sustained injuries during the riot on Tuesday.
Twenty-seven officers ended up hospitalized with severe injuries, which included minor bone fractures, serious facial injuries, lacerations, and a broken nose. One officer was knocked unconscious and suffered a concussion. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and police officials from the province of Merseyside condemned the violence, as well as right-wing British politicians who provoked the rioters.
Those who rioted in Southport on Tuesday night will “feel the full force of the law,” said Prime Minister Starmer. Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss issued a statement that read, “There has been much speculation and hypothesis around the status of a 17-year-old male who is currently in police custody, and some individuals are using this to bring violence and disorder to our streets. We have already said that the person arrested was born in the UK, and speculation helps nobody now.”
Many of the protesters are supporters of the English Defense League, a far-right British political group.
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Residents rush to help injured children moments after a rocket attack hit a soccer field in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on July 27th, 2024. Photo image courtesy of VOA News.
Unfortunately, children have been explicitly targeted for political violence by radicalized individuals, extremist groups, and national militaries over the past two decades.
On July 27th, the Lebanese Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah launched rockets into a soccer field in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 children. Many news reports claim the Golan Heights attack is the highest civilian death toll in Israel-held territory since Hamas’ October 7th attack on southern Israel.
The October 7th attack featured an attack on a music festival populated by young people in their early 20s and late teenage years. Across southwest Israel on the border of Gaza during the attack – Hamas terrorists are accused of slaughtering babies, burning whole families alive, raping women, and taking hundreds of innocent civilians hostage.
One hundred and fifteen children, women, and men are still held hostage by Hamas. After October 7th, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has since directed an infinitely more terrifying military bombardment on the citizens of Gaza that has now killed tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians than Hamas murdered and kidnapped on October 7th.
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US actress and celebrity Jennifer Garner (left) is a Save the Children Ambassador and Trustee. Photo image courtesy of Save the Children.
International organizations like the UN Human Rights, UN Women, and Save the Children International estimate that up to seventy percent (70%) of those confirmed killed in Gaza since October 2023 have been women and children.
As of the posting date of this blog essay, over 39,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the IDF’s current offensive in Gaza. The Israel versus Hamas war is happening in the context of over twenty years of US military incursions in various Middle Eastern countries that began after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
UNICEF estimates that over 9,000 children have been killed or maimed in Iraq since 2008. Moreover, a recent UNICEF report estimates that at least 120,000 children have been killed or injured by wars around the world across continents since 2005, an average of almost twenty a day.
In Great Britain and the United States, evidence of their wars against children abroad seems to have been “coming home” domestically since 1999.
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A black and white still image of Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, taken from the security video of Columbine High School during the massacre. Photo image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
In the United Kingdom, the most notable mass-violent attack on children happened in May 2017 when several children, including an 8-year-old girl, were killed in a terror attack at the concert of pop singer Ariana Grande in Manchester.
However, in America – there has been an unending procession of horrible mass shootings and violence against children since the Columbine High School massacre in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999. As high school students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold reveal – the perpetrators of killings against children are often other young people.
Among the most prominent recent school shootings in the US are the May 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas; the 2018 Parkland High School mass shooting in Florida – and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
All the school shootings mentioned above, like Monday’s knife attack in Southport – were perpetrated by young men in their late teenage years or early twenties.
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A list of school shootings in the United States of America over one month from January 1st, 2018, through February 14th, 2018. Image courtesy of 7News Miami.
If you conduct a Google search for “list of school shootings in the United States,” your search results will include web pages of directories that are so numerous – they command multi-part records, which all require several pages to complete the data set.
Public Health Policy Reviews thinks this is important to note because the national Republican Party (GOP) and their major gun lobby donors are currently disputing recent efforts by the US Surgeon General to treat gun violence as a public health emergency. Between 2019 and 2021, the leading cause of death for children ages 1 through 19 was gun violence.
Absent in-depth research into the underlying causes of gun violence against children in America, we can safely assume that much of the carnage is directly attributable to policy inaction regarding gun control and regulation. Of course, America is not alone in incidents of politically motivated acts of violence against children.
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American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift on the “Eras Tour” in Arlington, Texas, April 2nd, 2023. Photo image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
In 2011, far-right extremist Anders Behring Brevik killed 77 people, many of them teenagers, in a bomb attack and gun rampage targeting a youth summer camp on the island of Utøya in Tyrifjorden, Buskerud.
In 2014, an Islamist terrorist group named Boko Haram kidnapped two hundred and seventy-six female students aged 16 to 18 from a Christian school in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria. Boko Haram forced the girls into Islamic religious conversions, arranged marriages, and domestic violence at the hands of their Muslim captors.
These are just two of the most prominent instances of mass violence against children worldwide in a phenomenon that the United Nations and Human Rights Watch deems an international epidemic.
No one yet knows the reasons for the Monday attack on the girls in the Southport dance studio. However, our readers are speculating about the same thing we are; the attacker’s motives are related to the “Taylor Swift-themed” yoga dance party.