Although I now live in California, I was in the UK when the verdicts were reached in the Brianna Ghey murder trial. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing as I watched the wall-to-wall news coverage.
How could two children do something so utterly depraved? The diabolical planning that went into this premeditated evil… the vicious brutality.
I was overwhelmed by emotion watching Brianna’s mother, Esther, speak with such righteous fury about the final moments of her daughter’s life at the hands of these sadistic monsters. Imagining the last things Brianna would have seen on this earth. How she must have felt.
What kind of sickness could lead any human being to do something so unspeakable?
Well, now we know part of the answer. Once the names of Brianna’s murderers were revealed, along with details about their lives and their interactions, we saw just how far Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe had sunk into a pit of chilling inhumanity.
The pair planned their crimes through disgusting messages on WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Brianna Ghey’s mother, Esther, is calling for laws to restrict children’s smartphone use
Although I now live in California , I was in the UK when the verdicts were reached in the Brianna Ghey murder trial
Once the names of Brianna’s murderers were revealed, along with details about their lives and their interactions, we saw just how far Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe had sunk into a pit of chilling inhumanity
Jenkinson became addicted to watching the most vile horror films. Unbelievably, she had downloaded a special browser that enabled her to view real-life torture and even murder on the so-called Dark Web. The word ‘dark’ doesn’t even begin to do it justice.
But here’s the truly appalling fact: all of this was made possible by one thing. The smartphone.
Of course no reasonable person would argue that Jenkinson or Ratcliffe’s phone was responsible for their appalling crimes.
They, and they alone, are responsible. They have been convicted, sentenced and will pay for what they did. Good.
But when we ask the question, how could anyone do this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that the ease with which these deeply disturbed teenagers were able to marinate for hours on end, every day, in the most gruesome kind of violence, must surely have been a contributing factor.
And no less an authority on this case than Brianna’s brave mother has been making this argument in recent days. The internet is the ‘Wild West’, she says, and needs to be reined in.
She has started a petition calling for new laws to help parents control what their children can access online through their smartphones. She has demanded that mobile phone companies take more responsibility, and to provide phones for under-16s that don’t have social media apps.
She wants children’s phones to be automatically loaded with software that makes it easy for parents to monitor and control what they see.
I was overwhelmed by emotion watching Brianna’s mother, Esther, speak with such righteous fury about the final moments of her daughter’s life at the hands of these sadistic monsters
Why do children need smartphones at all? Parental controls can be evaded. Content can be shared (stock image)
Why are we allowing – even encouraging – children to turn their attention to screens instead of the world around them? Pictured: Steve Hilton
These are all sensible ideas. In fact, many have been implemented in America and are available for parents to use. Companies such as Gabb, Bark and Troomi market phones that they say are safe for children, with the look and feel of normal smartphones but without the ability to access social media platforms, and with built-in parental controls.
Pinwheel, for example, advertises its operating system as including only ‘safe, helpful apps out of the box, such as a calculator, flashlight and camera’. TikTok offers a service called Family Pairing that claims to let parents monitor what their children are watching.
YouTube, Google, Instagram… all the Big Tech companies tell us that they take the issue of child protection extremely seriously.
Indeed, we saw that message repeated by the CEOs of some of these companies as they were paraded earlier this month in front of the US Congress, for what now seems like an annual ritual. They meekly sit there for a few hours taking their punishment as the politicians yell at them… and then nothing much changes.
This year’s spectacle was particularly depressing. ‘You have blood on your hands!’ screamed an unhinged Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to Meta and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who was then prodded into apologising directly to parents in the audience whose children had been harmed by social media use.
Congratulations, Senator, you got your viral moment. But what are you actually going to do about all this? Nothing.
Political debates about children’s mobile phone use – and the actions taken by the businesses involved – always fall short because they dodge the central point. Why do children need smartphones at all? Parental controls can be evaded. Content can be shared. The problem is the mobile internet in children’s hands. As long as one child has access to it, all are at risk.
This is not just a question of individual choice. One family’s decision to give their child a smartphone undermines another family’s determination not to. In this sense, smartphones are like pollution – their proliferation affects us all.
Why are we allowing – even encouraging – children to turn their attention to screens instead of the world around them? It’s no use blaming social media platforms or mobile phone companies – it is our fault that we have let this happen.
But that means we can change it, too. For nearly ten years I’ve argued that we should ban smartphones for children.
In fact, I made the case for a ban in the Mail in 2016, a few years after I’d stopped using a mobile phone altogether. And that wasn’t for any noble reason – it was because of sand on a beach in Florida. Let me explain.
When mobile phones became widely available in the mid-to-late 1990s, I happily participated. As people who knew me then will testify, I was an avid texter.
What I never adopted, though, was the smartphone.
When the iPhone came out, I stuck religiously to my old-fashioned Nokia which served me well. I wanted to be able to communicate but I didn’t want to be flooded by information – emails, notifications, everything that was going on in the world – all the time.
Brianna Ghey, 16, was murdered on 11 February 2023
For nearly ten years I’ve argued that we should ban smartphones for children (stock image)
When I moved to California and I needed to buy a new phone that worked over here, I was disappointed to discover that my beloved Nokia had been discontinued.
For a while I persevered with second-hand models that had been refurbished, but this became more and more of a hassle.
And eventually, on a Florida beach, the charging port on my phone got clogged with sand and I gave up.
A week or so later, cycling to Stanford University to teach my class, I suddenly realised I had gone for many days without a phone – and it was fine. Admittedly I was no longer in the frenetic world of politics and government, but still, it was striking to me that I hadn’t really noticed the absence of a mobile phone very much.
I remember thinking: ‘I’ll see how it feels for a bit longer. I’m sure I’ll get a phone by Christmas.’
Well, that was nearly 12 years ago. And as the world has moved inexorably into the Smartphone Era, I have resisted.
Yes, that has led to the occasional mix-up. Yes, I’m sure if you talked to family, friends and business associates they would offer up a few grumbles about not being able to get hold of me.
But I’ve managed to start and run a tech company, host a top-rated politics show on national television and more recently launch an effort to turn things around in California – all without using a smartphone.
I’m not saying that everyone can or should do this. I understand that, for some people, a smartphone is a lifeline or essential for their job. I’m merely saying that if I can live without a smartphone in the heart of Silicon Valley, surely children can, too.
I am very familiar with the objections to a ban on these devices – that it’s the parents’ responsibility; that we don’t want governments wading in and banning things.
Of course it’s true that parents are primarily responsible for their children’s welfare – it’s the most important role any parent will play in life. But it’s also true we would never accept some kind of total free-for-all where parents – and only parents – determine what the rules are.
We already have all sorts of ‘bans’, or to put it in a less provocative way, age restrictions.
We are perfectly happy to ‘ban’ children from having sex, alcohol, driving a car… the list goes on. Only the most demented libertarian would suggest removing these entirely sensible age restrictions and leaving it all up to parents.
Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has announced a Government recommendation that phones are banned throughout the school day, including during break-times, ‘in order to tackle disruptive behaviour and online bullying while boosting attention during lessons’.
The pair planned their crimes through disgusting messages on WhatsApp and Snapchat
Brianna’s mother has started a petition calling for new laws to help parents control what their children can access online through their smartphones. Pictured: Brianna Ghey
It’s a good start – but it’s just a recommendation, not the law. And so it will doubtless be implemented in a patchy way, defeating the entire point of something which is trying to change expectations of what’s acceptable across society.
You even hear concern that teachers, though they can see the harm caused by smartphone use, may not want to police it. How pathetic.
But Brianna Ghey’s killers didn’t just pursue their vile online obsessions at school. It’s obvious that age restrictions, if they are to solve the scourge of youth smartphone use, must be applied across the board. The Government needs to do much more than this half-hearted step in the right direction.
That’s the proper response to the argument that this should simply be a parent’s responsibility.
We need a society-wide age limit, not just because it is sadly evident a minority of parents would fail in their responsibility to impose appropriate guidelines.
The reason we need a ban is to help the majority of responsible parents who desperately want to save their children from smartphones but feel it’s impossible when every other child has one.
We all know the power and persistence of peer pressure: ‘Mum, all my friends do it, why can’t I?’ The simple answer – because it’s against the law – would save endless nagging and negotiating.
Brianna’s brave mother says the internet is the ‘Wild West’ and needs to be reined in
Tributes are left at a vigil to mark the one year anniversary of the murder of Brianna Grey in Warrington on 11 February 2024
Just listen to the words of Esther Ghey herself, this time talking about Brianna’s smartphone use: ‘From Brianna and her phone usage, I understand how hard it is to monitor children. In today’s society, young people can hide things so well, it’s just so difficult to be a parent now. So I get it… it was a constant battle between me and her.’
Talk to any parent and you’ll hear something similar. So what on earth are we doing, fiddling around the edges of this massive social catastrophe, with footling so-called solutions such as easily evaded parental controls, instead of tackling the problem head-on?
The answer to that question is contained in another line about Brianna in her mother’s interview: ‘I would say that she was addicted to a mobile phone as so many people are, even adults now.’
Even adults now. Exactly.
From children themselves, you hear what is in some ways the killer objection to a smartphone age limit: ‘Well you’re on your phone the whole time, so if you don’t let me do it you’re just a hypocrite.’
There we have it: out of the mouths of babes, the devastating truth.
Yes, adults do seem utterly addicted to their wretched smartphones, endlessly scrolling and swiping and jabbing – and for what?
It is simply not true, as I hear many people claim, that you can’t survive in the modern world without a smartphone.
When are we going to wake up? These addictive mobile computers are rapidly taking over our lives and our society.
Outrageously, more and more products and services are being designed in a way that actually requires a smartphone.
This kind of digital discrimination should be outlawed: we should be encouraging less smartphone use, not more.
And when it comes to our children, considering all we now know about brain development and emotional growth, it is reckless beyond belief – abusive, frankly – to allow them access to these harmful and destructive devices.
It is time to put a stop to it with clear rules and strong incentives. No child needs a smartphone and no child should have one.