Brianna Ghey’s mum and MP are campaigning to stop children from having access to social media apps.
Charlotte Nichols, Warrington North MP, told the ECHO she is backing Esther Ghey – who is currently calling on the government to consider imposing age restrictions on smartphones.
It comes after Esther’s daughter, Brianna, was stabbed to death by Scarlett Jenkinson, from Warrington, and Eddie Ratcliffe, from Leigh, Wigan, last year in a park. Both teenagers, who were previously known as Girl X and Boy Y, had a fascination with violence which they were able to indulge through their smartphones.
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MP Nichols told the ECHO: "Its really difficult for parents to be able to monitor their children every hour of the day. It’s bizarre when you compare smartphones to things like video games, films, alcohol and tobacco which all have age restrictions, but there is no safeguarding when it comes to phones.
“Brianna also had access to social media and pro-anorexia content and self-harm material, which made her more vulnerable than she would have been if she didn’t have access to it.”
Esther, a mum-of-two, told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg it was not “doable” for parents to consistently check what their children were being exposed to. The new product development technologist wants companies to flag searches of inappropriate material to parents.
She 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.
"And also to have software that is automatically downloaded on the parents' phone which links to the children's phone, that can highlight keywords. 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."
Scarlett, by her own admission, was aged only around 14 when she first downloaded TOR – a web browser which enabled her to access the dark web. There, she was able to feed her secret desires for violence and bloodlust by scouring “red rooms” for torture videos.
Additionally, during the trial, the court heard messages recovered from Jenkinson and Ratcliffe’s phones showed a "preoccupation with violence, torture and death" and "recorded them discussing how they wanted to kill people that they knew" through a messaging app.
Esther said if the searches her daughter’s killers had made had been flagged, their parents would have been “able to get some kind of help”.
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