To wholeheartedly agree with Brianna Ghey’s mother

[Moonpig82]

I spotted this article this morning. We personally do not allow Tik Tok, Insta, Facebook, Snapchat. For our eldest who has just got a phone when starting Year 7. However we have succumbed to whatsapp.

What are people’s thoughts? How can we ‘police’ our children’s phones?

Or AIBU and there is no policing for social media? I know my Year 7 child’s friends do have these apps. Not all of them though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68193103

I don't think social media or DC owning smartphones is the cause of Brianna's death.

Jamie Bulger's killers were able to plan their attack without it.

Maybe it's the parenting that's the problem. A PP has said that one of the killers' father is a sex offender. That is much more likely to be the driver than owning a smartphone.
From memory one of Jamie Bulger's killers also had a troubled background. Maybe that is where we should be looking.

We had a weird and nasty child in my primary school in the 1970s. She squashed a kitten with her bare hands and strung up a dog. No phones or any sort of media then, but domestic violence at home.

DC all over the country have and use phones and for the vast majority it isn't a problem. They are used within reason and the DC have other interests too.

They can be very useful. Mine got phones at 10 when they started walking to school alone. They also used them in secondary school, during lessons, for research.

The phones may be used as a tool, but are not the root cause.

I was a teenager in the early 2000s, before smartphones. The only social media, arguably, was LiveJournal, which only nerdy/creative kids had, anyway. There were still cases of teenagers plotting murders through technology. They just used AIM or email. People still found really horrible images and videos online, too.

Disallowing smartphones for younger teenagers might help stem the tide, but I don’t think it would completely solve the environment that contributed to this murder.

We very much know that SM is not a positive influence in young people’s lives. That it is harmful. There is plenty of data that supports that.
It would of course be possible to make it much more difficult for children to access SM but there needs to be collective will to do so; and governments who prioritise well being over business interests. I don’t think we have either.

Of course it can be done.

The minority requiring assistive technology can be catered to.

The UK needs to acquire a CAN DO attitude rather than endlessly saying it can't, and acquiescing to the Fuckerbergs of the world.

100% agree

Exchange social media for tv, why do society have shows like csi, like Dexter etc various films glamourisimg crime etc

We need to retool society to make it better

Every parent of teenagers that I know says they wish they could ban phones. Yet then everyone says it’s impossible. Surely we need to find a way to make it possible?

they are literally doing it now with vapes- like they did with cigarettes

Agree. ‘Phone’ is a misnomer anyway - it’s a device which gives them access to hugely inappropriate content .

How is this case anything to do with kids using social media? The perpetrators were getting their fix from watching content on the dark web.

It would require an authoritarian government to take charge and set the rules, as they do in China. Kids are banned from gaming except in certain hours there, I think the platforms are disabled nationwide. Anything less than that and people are going to find ways round it.

Exactly, I think a lot of people jump to blaming horror movies (back in the day), gaming and now social media.

Some individuals have early life trauma, dreadful experiences which impact decision making, anti social personality disorders, mad or bad.

It's multi factorial and not a black and white issue which many are oversimplifying

Children plotting to murder their fellow classmates is thankfully incredibly rare and child murderers have existed since way before the availability of social media. If there is evidence that social media has led to an increase in sadistic crimes by kids then by all means let’s have the debate about it but until then it should remain the parent’s responsibility to restrict or allow their child’s access to the internet and to have regular discussions with them about what they are seeing and who they are communicating with.

That’s good your cousin can enforce it. My now 17 year old would never have accepted that at 15. For one thing he wanted to be in touch with his girlfriend ( and probably sexchat, let’s be realistic) and there’s no way he was going to do that via my phone.

So why don't they? Because they can. For their own kids. Or limit access. Or control usage.

What use is saying they wish they could but then do fuck all about it?

Why is everyone expecting the "government" to do something?

If you feel that strongly and it's that important,do it yourself (whether I agree or not it's irrelevant).

My point exactly. As much as I feel for Ms Ghey it's not as simple as she made out. She made various claims and suggestions un her interview that wouldn't work. She's obviously not an IT expert but a grieving mother.

Phones are completely banned at my kids secondary school, for both staff and students. They have to be turned off and in lockers at all times.

It makes a huge difference.

We cannot prevent children smoking drinking and having sex underage how exactly will we police online? Parents will just put phones in their names or payg phones which don't even need to be registered to work

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/scarlett-jenkinson-brianna-ghey-killer-sentencing-b2489498.html

Absolute failure of the system if the Mum is looking for blame (which I totally understand she would be).

The problem isn’t just the platforms but what they allow to be posted annd their unwillingness or inability to act upon reported posts that are problematic at best.

furthermore we as parents need to teach our kids to be more open about talking about problems with peers or sitting down with our kids and policing their social media interactions ourselves. This shouldn’t be done in secret but with our kids beside us so it opens up much needed conversations about behaviour online and appropriateness.

And we also have to hold a degree of responsibility for raising entitled bullies. We see it daily on here, multiple times a post arseholes and bullies out in force where it’s unwarranted and if adults are showing their kids this is how we behave then why should we expect them to behave any differently?

The problem doesn’t lie solely with the software, it lies with how we ourselves behave and teach or accept our kids behaving.

While not exactly the topic of the thread I feel this is related to the tech part of the equation.

In a Tedtalk a few years ago, a research team was trying to assess the impact of porn on teenage boys. They were unable to form a control group as they were unable to find ANY boys who didn't.

The consensus was, the age to buy your child a phone with internet access was when you were comfortable with them having unrestricted access to porn.

Obviously this translates to a lot of other areas on the internet, such as self harm and suicide sites.

Unfortunately it just is not possible, yes some good parents would stop their children having smart phones but plenty of others wouldn’t and some kids would just find a way around it, and I’d bet a pound to a penny those murderers can from troubled home lives.

Unfortunately a small percentage of the population are bad and will kill no matter what, I think that’s what has happened in this case.

You’re going to arrest parents for handing their child a phone to keep them amused on a train? In a hospital apt?

Exactly! We have a strong enough history of child killers to know it’s much more than SM.

It isn't just phones though. It's tablets, laptops, computers, gaming devices, modern TVs, Kindles etc.

These are pervasive in our society; we depend on these things to live a modern life. With AI, it will grow. It is a whole other world on top of our physical one. We have to adapt to it, somehow.

At the moment we authorise any app DD downloads, her phone can only go through our wireless so goes through a proxy - we can look at the logs and restrict sites. We search her phone.

You can see the personality difference between her friends who access TikTok - at 11 and 12 - and those who don't.