Two years after a horrific attack, surviving children bravely reunite for a playdate. The small gathering of young girls looked like an ordinary afternoon – they chatted giddily, practised pilates and twirled around in new outfits to the music of Harry Styles. But on the sidelines, some of the parents were in tears. The last time these girls shared a room was 29 July 2024, when a hooded teenager turned a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport into one of the most horrific attacks on children in modern British history.
Three girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine – were murdered. Eight other children and two adults were stabbed repeatedly, some critically injured. The idea that any of the surviving children would feel able to meet again seemed impossible until recently. Only now, nearly two years on, the parents of five of those girls are ready to speak. Over nearly four hours of interviews, they told of their daughters’ heroism that day, when girls of primary school age saved lives by shielding others, and how they feel their courage risks being forgotten. None of the families can be identified, so their names have been changed.
The attack and the bravery of children
The attack occurred at The Hart Space, a dance studio in Southport, Merseyside. Axel Rudakubana, then 17, carried out a stabbing spree using a 20cm knife he had purchased on 13 July 2024, two weeks earlier. He had researched the London Bridge terror attacks and possessed a PDF of an Al-Qaeda training manual. At his trial, he pleaded guilty to three counts of murder, ten counts of attempted murder, and other charges including possession of ricin and a terror-related offence. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 52 years on 23 January 2025.
The day of the attack, 26 children were present. Many were making bracelets, minutes away from being picked up, when an older boy walked in with the knife. At first, some thought it was a prank. One of the girls, then seven, put her arms around others as he started to attack. She helped a girl down the stairs and shielded another by crouching over her. CCTV footage showed her staggering outside, only to be grabbed by the killer and dragged back inside. She was stabbed 33 times and lost her entire blood volume, leaving her in a coma for five days. Her mother said her bravery had been lost in the many stories of heroism: “I felt so devastated for her, that we’re at home building up this recovery for her, saying: ‘You saved yourself,’ when the world has no idea what she’s done.”
When she woke, she was reunited with a girl aged eight, whom she had shielded and helped to escape. They had been placed on the same ward at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool. One morning, her parents pulled back the curtain and “their faces lit up”. “They were wearing the same Lilo & Stitch nightie,” her mother said. “They didn’t know each other’s name at that point, they just knew they were together. They’ve formed a really special bond.”
Another survivor, then aged ten, had been desperate to go to the Hart Space event with her ten-year-old sister. The event was fully booked within days of being advertised. The older sister shielded the younger from the blows, suffering several wounds herself. When she woke in hospital, her first thoughts were about her sister. “Is she OK?” she asked. Their mother said: “She saved her sister’s life that day. The word ‘heroes’ is thrown about and people are heroes for what they did. They saved themselves, they got themselves out of this building, they ran – and they did their absolute best when many of them were critically injured.”
A girl who was ten at the time was one of the last to be attacked. She was stabbed three times to the back with enough force to penetrate her chest wall, but still managed to escape. She was minutes from death on the street when paramedics arrived from a Midlands air ambulance, which was only in the region by coincidence as it returned from an abandoned job elsewhere. “She had finished bleeding out – she had no blood pressure or anything – and would have died on the scene,” her mother said. The mother now holds a stuffed toy air ambulance she cherishes, saying the sheer luck of the Midlands crew flying nearby has made her believe in a “higher power”. “You couldn’t have planned that divine timing,” she said.
Another survivor, then nine, was stabbed three times to the back as she ran, fracturing her shoulder blade and vertebrae. Despite her ordeal, she had “no self-pity” and wore her scars with “dignity and defiance”, her mother said, describing her as “immensely brave, extremely vulnerable and alone”. “Our daughter made the split-second decision to get out of that building whilst suffering incomprehensible injuries,” she said. “She fled out of instinct – not direction or shielding. There is never a single story. Our daughter is our hero and her own hero.”
Living with the aftermath
The days after the attack are a complete blur for many of the families. Many spent more than a week in hospital not knowing whether their girls would pull through or, if they did, what lasting damage had been done. Outside, rioters torched asylum hotels, police vans and libraries in a frenzy of race-fuelled violence across England. The riots were fueled by misinformation spread online, including false claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived by boat. Most of the families were in the dark about the riots and are wary of speaking about it now. However, one mother said that a police officer who helped her daughter was attacked the following night by rioters in Southport. “They still had our daughter’s blood on them and they were getting bricks thrown at them,” she said.
There is no magic formula to recovering from childhood trauma, let alone an experience so viscerally shocking. Many of the girls and their parents receive support from psychologists and counsellors, but the memory of that day is raw and triggers are everywhere: a song on the radio, a man walking alone, even other children. One young survivor is “constantly on alert of anyone, her trust is completely gone”, her mother said. After dropping her older sister at school one morning, they saw an old man walking his dog nearby as they drove away. The younger girl insisted her mother call the school to check her sister was OK. The two sisters, now ten and 12, refuse to shower alone because they do not want to be by themselves. Their mother said: “I have to sit on the toilet [while they shower] and I see their scars all the time. As a parent it’s traumatising because it’s a constant reminder of what they have and still are going through.”
Parents worry that as their girls become teenagers they will be more conscious about their scars. When one survivor, now 12, started secondary school last year, her parents told her not to tell other children she was caught up in the attack. “Don’t make that who you are,” they said. She has to wear pressure garments 23 hours a day and sleeps in a splint to help her scars heal. On her first day at the new school, an older boy found out and asked her: “Why aren’t you dead?” “She was sobbing on her first day of school,” her mother said. Before the attack she threw herself into hobbies such as drama; now she will not go: “She doesn’t like being with other kids she doesn’t know.” At Christmas, they took her to a pantomime where children were invited to go on stage. She refused, telling her father: “The last time I went out with a load of kids I got stabbed.”
Many of the parents have become friends, sharing these difficult conversations together. One survivor, now nine, is still processing her memories of that day and the weeks before it. She had forgotten about a trip to London a month earlier to see her idol Taylor Swift in concert, and shopping with her friends the day before. Earlier this month, she recalled for the first time a particularly harrowing scene – the moment she was dragged back into the building. Her mother described how they used a bookshelf metaphor: “When it first happened we were like: ‘OK, imagine your brain is a bookshelf. What happened to you has basically tipped all of your books on the floor and all the books are memories, they will be jumbled up now.’” They told her some of the books might be scary and she could put them back on the shelf in her own time. “For a little while now, she’s been saying: ‘There’s two books on the floor and they’re really scary and I don’t want to pick them up.’ And so we’ve said: ‘OK, we’re just going to tuck them under the bookshelf for now.’ Last week, she decided that was the time to tell us about one of the books and it was her experience of being taken back in. So she’s still processing moments of that day that she hasn’t verbalised before, and we’re nearly two years on.”
The psychological impact extends to the parents themselves. Many have had difficulty accessing their own support. Some have post-traumatic stress disorder, suffering flashbacks and night terrors, having rushed into the building searching for their children and later finding them gravely injured nearby. Yet many were only entitled to 12 sessions with a counsellor provided by the charity Victim Support, rather than a specialist psychiatrist. One couple said they were effectively forced to “ration” this support, saving some counselling sessions for the criminal trial and public inquiry rather than accessing it immediately. The father was refused more than 12 sessions because there was no funding. “Our experience has been more frustrating than we would have liked,” the mother said. “It’s hard to have to justify why you’re traumatised – and really quickly we realised the basic counselling offer was not fit for purpose for what we had gone through.” The victims’ commissioner for England and Wales has raised concerns about the “woeful” support provided to families.
The Southport Inquiry, whose report was published in April 2026, highlighted “catastrophic” failures by agencies in information sharing and found that Rudakubana’s parents created “significant obstacles” to his access to agencies. The inquiry concluded the stabbings could have been prevented. Rudakubana was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in February 2021. He had a history of concerning behaviour, including being expelled from school at 13 for bringing a knife and assaulting a student with a hockey stick. He was referred to the Prevent counter-extremism programme three times between 2019 and 2021 but was not deemed to meet the threshold for intervention due to a lack of identified terrorist ideology. Despite concerns raised by teachers and a support worker about his “extreme views” and interest in violence, effective intervention was lacking. He had received care from an NHS mental health service for four years prior to the attack but stopped engaging in February 2023. He was discharged from mental health services six days before the attack, following a risk assessment whose findings have not been disclosed.
Many of the parents knew about these systemic failings, but it was the errors of individuals – particularly the killer’s parents and some officials – that they found most shocking. One father said “there’s got to be accountability” on the part of the attacker’s parents: “If I had a dog and it killed a kid, who’s getting done for it?” Merseyside police investigated whether the parents could be held criminally responsible, given they knew he posed a risk and had amassed weapons in their home. However, there is no duty on parents under UK law to warn or report criminality, so detectives felt they were unable to prosecute. Another father said: “Clearly there were masses of opportunities for them to stop their own child. I can understand the conflict in their own mind about doing that but at the same time there were plenty of opportunities.”
In the Easter holidays, six of the girls met again for the first time. The playdate was made as relaxed and fun as possible. They did pilates, shared cupcakes and wore yoga outfits specially made for those who wanted to hide their scars. As they watched, some of the parents were in tears. “I’m happy, I’m relieved, it’s OK to see me cry,” one mother said, as her daughter comforted her. Afterwards, the families went for pizza because the girls did not want to leave one another. One girl told her mother: “It was like having big sisters.” They plan to meet up again – this time with 17 of the girls – at the end of May. When they got home, one girl told her parents it was the “happiest she’d been in a long time”. The girls had not spoken about what happened, she said: “We all just knew.”
