Brianna Ghey’s mother calls for ban on social media apps for under-16s
Brianna Ghey’s mother has called for a ban on social media apps for under-16s after her daughter’s killers searched for videos of torture and murder online.
Esther Ghey said if their search history had been flagged, their parents may have been “able to get some kind of help”.
The bereaved mother said she does not “carry any hate” for Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, both 16, but added that she cannot forgive them.
Ms Ghey went on to say that she does not blame the teenagers’ parents and would be “open” to speaking with Jenkinson’s mother, who she described as looking “completely broken” and going through an “absolutely horrific time”.
Jenkinson and Ratcliffe were both 15 when they killed Brianna, 16, with a hunting knife after luring her to Linear Park, Culcheth, a village near Warrington, Cheshire, on February 11 last year.
It emerged during the trial that Jenkinson had watched videos of torture and murder online.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, Ms Ghey said: “We’d like a law introduced so that there are mobile phones that are only suitable for under-16s.
“So if you’re over 16, you can have an adult phone, but then under the age of 16, you can have a children’s phone, which will not have all of the social media apps that are out there now.
“Also to have software that is automatically downloaded on the parents’ phone which links to the children’s phone, that can highlight key words.
“So if a child is searching the kind of words that Scarlett and Eddie were searching, it will then flag up on the parent’s phone.”
Ms Ghey said that if the teenagers’ searches had been flagged, their parents may have been able to intervene.
She added that Brianna, who was transgender, had accessed pro-anorexia and self-harm material online and been “very protective” over her phone.
“If she couldn’t have accessed the sites, she wouldn’t have suffered as much,” Ms Ghey said.
She described the internet as the “Wild West” and said the focus of technology had been on making money rather than “how we protect people or how we can necessarily benefit society”.
Ms Ghey said her daughter was “absolutely full of life” and “really, really outgoing”.
“She just, she loved attention,” she said. “She loved to be on TikTok, she loved having all of the likes that she used to receive and she was the life and soul of the party really.
“Everyone who knew Brianna and anybody who ever met Brianna, would never forget her.”
Responding to Ms Ghey’s proposals, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said the recently passed Online Safety Act had “tools” to tackle the issues raised, including age verification checks for inappropriate material.
She said: “This is a massive piece of legislation, probably quite a leading position that we’ve taken in really making sure that the platforms are accountable for proper age verification, for inappropriate things being unavailable and inappropriate things, most importantly, not being there.
“What we’re looking to do is to go one step further and ban the use of mobile phones in schools.”
