Beyond Control

What the Southport inquiry misses about fear, power and adolescent risk by Kat Sumner

Apr 14, 2026

After I published yesterdays piece on Southport, digital harm and adolescent risk, I had a long exchange with my friend Kat. What follows is her response. It does not repeat my argument. Instead, it pushes in a different direction, asking what the inquiry may still miss about fear, control, parental authority, and the relational dynamics that can develop when an adolescent becomes powerful through making others afraid. I think it makes an important companion piece.

What strikes me most about the Southport inquiry is that, while it criticises institutions for seeing events as isolated incidents, it often ends up documenting the boy’s life in much the same way: one incident after another, one referral after another, one missed opportunity after another.

That is all true. But I do not think it is the deepest truth.

What I think the report still does not really grasp is the control dynamic.

I do not mean control in the narrow sense of rules, restraint or authority. I mean a relational pattern in which fear becomes power. A child or adolescent discovers that they can make other people afraid, and that fear gives them a form of control, status and even respect. The more this happens, the more it can become the organising logic of their relationships.

Read through that lens, the pattern looks different.

He frightened his father. He frightened his mother. He frightened schools. He frightened CAMHS. He frightened the police. He frightened a whole series of institutions which were, on paper, more powerful than him. And yet none of them could actually contain him in a meaningful way. They could refer him, discuss him, assess him, flag him, pathologise him, criticise his parents, move him between services, but they could not really stop him. What message does that send to a teenager already organised around fear and control?

It tells him that he is powerful.

It tells him that adults are weak.

It tells him that institutions can control his parents more easily than they can control him.

It tells him that fear works.

I am not claiming privileged access to his inner life. I am pointing to a pattern that many families and practitioners will recognise. Some adolescents do come to experience fear as proof of their own power, especially when adults repeatedly back down, fragment, or hand the problem on.

That is one reason I do not find the inquiry’s criticism of the parents especially persuasive in the form it takes. Of course parents matter. Of course they made mistakes. Of course there were things they should have done differently. But prior to the final weeks before the event, what exactly are people imagining here? What did they think this family was realistically able to do with a man-sized teenager that multiple public services also could not manage?

That is the question I keep coming back to.

The report often treats this as a failure of parental authority. I think that is too shallow. What I see is a breakdown in the parent-child relationship under conditions where authority had already become meaningless. Those are not the same thing. A teenager can stop respecting their parents long before anyone admits that the relationship itself is in danger. Once fear enters that space, and once the teenager sees the parents as frightened, weak or contemptible, the family is already in serious trouble.

And what did services do in that context?

Too often, they undermined the parents without replacing them with anything meaningful.

That is a disastrous combination.

If institutions are going to step into family life in serious ways, then they have to understand that their relationship with the child and with the parents matters enormously. You cannot treat relationship as secondary and then be surprised when nothing improves. The parents’ relationship with the child is the foundation of the child’s relationship with themselves and with the wider world. If services have a poor relationship with the parents and a poor relationship with the child, how exactly is anything supposed to get better?

This is why I do not think yet another layer of specialist agency is the answer. The report’s recommendations often feel to me like the same basic impulse repeated: more process, more escalation, more information management, more specialist handling, more movement between boxes. But why would we assume another agency would solve the problem when the existing ones did not even understand what they were looking at? If each service failed to see the wood for the trees, why would adding another stop on the merry-go-round help?

It just creates another point of failure.

Another point where people can argue about who did or did not pass information on.

Another place where risk can be abstracted out of relationship and turned into a procedural object.

What seems more likely to help is the opposite: fewer boundaries between services, more continuity, more relational skill, more front-loaded expertise, and less forcing children and families to fail their way through standardised pathways before anybody serious gets involved. One of the worst features of public services is this needs escalator model, where people are passed through layer after layer of low-grade input, dubious judgement and bureaucratic delay until the problem is so entrenched that it is much harder to understand or help.

By then, the paper trail is huge, the real picture is harder to see, and the family has learned that services are procedural rather than relational.

That matters because procedural systems are often disastrous with adolescents who are already organised around control.

A box-ticking institution can document risk forever without changing the dynamic that produces it.

A relational institution at least has a chance.

I am not saying containment never matters. Some situations do require hard boundaries, enforced safety, and decisions that protect other people. But containment is not the same as domination. A relational response with boundaries is not the same thing as a power struggle. If the whole interaction is organised around who controls whom, then the adolescent with the fewest internal brakes on their own behaviour has an advantage. Short of physically removing them from the home and community altogether, which we are often unwilling or unable to do, you are in a battle they are structurally more likely to win.

That is why I keep coming back to relationship.

Relationships are what protect children. Not in a sentimental sense. In a practical sense. Healthy relationships with adults who consider themselves truly responsible for the child are what make the difference. It is relationships that help children internalise brakes. It is relationships that make self-control possible. It is relationships that allow a teenager to choose not to go all the way to the end of an impulse.

And if that sounds idealistic, it is worth asking the harder question: what is the alternative?

What exactly do we think teaches a teenager to stop themselves?

Not to fear punishment for a while.

Not to comply while someone stronger is present.

Not to perform the right script for a professional.

To actually stop themselves.

That is a different developmental task. And it cannot be produced by fear alone.

In fact, authoritarian and control-based approaches often fail most obviously in adolescence for exactly this reason. They can appear to work when children are smaller, more dependent, and easier to physically contain. But adolescence changes the balance. A young person grows stronger. Their independence expands. Their need to choose relationship rather than merely submit to control becomes much more important. If the underlying relationship is weak, then adolescence exposes that brutally.

So when people say the problem here was parental authority, I think they are naming the wrong thing. The deeper problem was a breakdown in the parent-child relationship, combined with a set of institutions that related to both the parents and the child primarily through procedure, escalation and control.

That is not a recipe for safety.

It is a recipe for alienation.

I also think we should pay more attention to the teenagers who are doing well in the same ecosystems. Same schools. Same online world. Same services. Same broad society. Why do some hold on and others collapse? Obviously there are individual vulnerabilities involved. But I suspect the difference is very often found in relationships: adults who are genuinely responsible, genuinely trusted, and still able to matter to the adolescent when things begin to go wrong.

That is what I wish the inquiry had been more curious about.

Not just who failed to pass information.

Not just which threshold was missed.

Not just which referral should have happened sooner.

But what kind of relationships were present, which ones were breaking down, and what happened when fear displaced trust as the organising force.

Because once fear becomes power, and once everyone around the young person is drawn into that logic, it is very hard to get out by trying to control harder.

The route away is not no boundaries.

It is a different relational dynamic.

And if we do not understand that, I do not think we will understand much at all.

Safe by Default

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?

Safe by Default

Beyond Control

What the Southport inquiry misses about fear, power and adolescent risk by Kat Sumner

Further reading

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?