As long ago as 1971 Lourie & Lourie summarised child-help [agencies]:

“as being a confused set of fragmented services…We parcel children out to institutions on the basis of social, legal, and sometimes diagnostic labels that neither describe the child nor offer a prescriptive base for treatment. …most observers agree on the following:

• Service delivery arrangements are geared more to professional and field needs than to children’s,
• We deal with crises more than prevention,
• We reach only a fraction of the need population,
•We know that childhood difficulties begin in infancy, yet our child programs concentrate on events beginning after this critical period,
• Our programs do not follow research findings: we concentrate on those likely to be cured rather than on tough cases.”

(American Journal of Orthopsychiatry vol. 40, No. 4 July, 1970 pp 684-693)

The evidence from two recent horrific cases – Sara Sharif and Axel Radukubana- confirms that this state of affairs unbelievably exists home50 years later!

And until recently I too accepted this to be the systemic problem. However, the recent cases of Sara Sharif and Axel Rubakubana made me change my mind. Two threads are at the core of an alternative explanation for failure to prevent such human tragedies. The first is the assumption that each of the agencies are conducting appropriate assessments and that the only error is not collating them properly. But what if any or all of the assessments are inadequate. Summing the error-prone parts to create a more complete whole picture would still fail to ensure ‘lessons have been learned’. The notion that proper co-operation among the various agencies would have prevented Axel from killing three young girls, injuring many more and traumatizing yet more is based on the notion that the whole ‘truth’ is greater than the sum of the ‘system’s’ parts.

An alternative explanation would suggest a fundamental flaw in the ‘assessment’ model used by each and every agency: focusing on the perpertrator. When I conducted assessments for educational, legal and medico-legal purposes I did so as home-based family workshops. This root systemicmodel achieved several key purposes: it helped establish the world-views of all the participants, the nature of the interaction among them and the conditions in which they lived.

Few things in life are self-evident, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that sufficient evidence already would have existed from such a visit to Axel’s home; and his bedroom in particular, to know that he posed a threat to humanity at large. The lesson to be learned is not for better co-ordination among the agencies; if, separately, they’re doing the thing wrong, they’ll simply continue to do the thing wrong. Instead the lesson that should be learned is to conduct a proper assessment of individuals and their interactors in the first place.

As an aside, my own experience in failing to get the relevant agencies to acknowledge a mind-body mis-match (in practical terms, writing with the non-adept hand) as a co-factor in a variety of presenting problems, convinces me that little will ever change. One reason, to re-phrase Lourie & Lourie, is the pervasive role of silo thinking and vested interests. In my own case, failure of the relevant agencies to acknowledge the consequences of this condition exists in the Anglo-Saxon speaking world but not in Germany. ;or which see the work of Dr Barbara Sattler at https://lefthander-consulting.org/deutsch