Guilty verdict in Brianna Ghey case

[RoyalCorgi]

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/20/brianna-ghey-found-guilty-murder

Not a surprise - it felt very clear-cut.

Given their age. I wonder how the sentencing would have differed in Scotland?

Good grief, even the Daily Mail - which has been running horrendous anti-trans hitpieces every day for months - can't pretend transphobia had nothing to do with this case anymore.

I haven't seen anything anti trans articles.

The only thing I've seen is transphobia was possibly a minor motive for the boy. Who wasn't even the main driver. I admit I've not read the articles because they're upsetting and, frankly, ghoulish, so headlines and subheadings. If I'm wrong I don't give a shit. The avidity that some posters seem to have, they want transphobia. Perhaps they think it'll justify all the years of lies and hyperbole, that women saying 'no' is literal genocide?

The thing is, if the girl's first target had turned up Brianna would still be alive, although possibly disturbed at being on a kill list, a different family would be grieving and, except for the novelty of children from 'good' homes being murderers, not half the attention would be given. Including me, I doubt I would have posted anything about it.

In extremely glad there's going to be reviews and investigations into the failure to share information and red flags around Scarlett and her behaviour leading to this terrible murder.

Whether it was preventable is another matter but it's clear that there were issues known about that were not effectively communicated to those who could have potentially safeguarded all these children more adequately.

Do we know if either young people had presenting behaviour which was refferred to CAMHS, or did no one feel there were problems, or did CAMHS not work with the family or did the kids not engage (common)?

The girl was previously expelled for poisoning a fellow pupil (female) which resulted in hospital treatment and police involvement.

The girl was moved to the inclusion unit at Birchwood as a result. There's a mix of vulnerable and troubled kids there. Brianna was also in this unit for extreme anxiety issues.

Brianna was also known to have been made unwell by an attempt by this girl to poison them.

Yet the school were apparently unaware of this previous poisoning incident.

It was widely known that the girl was known to have a kill list, which wasn't taken seriously despite having tried to poison other kids. Twice. It's been since revealed the girl has written another kill list whilst in custody. So yeah, obviously just about transphobia this...

Warrington council have launched a safeguarding review. (In which precisely no one will be held accountable).

It's fucking bonkers: let's put the kid with a known history of bullying and harming with the kid with anxiety who is trans. And then not tell the school about the full nature of the reasons for expulsion.

Who the fucking hell thought that was a good idea?

Please someone tell me.

The judge has ruled that transphobia was present in both killers, in terms of their identification of the victim.

But you'd also have to be blind and ignorant to fail to acknowledge that the local authority failure to protect Brianna by lack of shared information and putting known violent kids together with the most vulnerable kids in the borough is off the scale failure in safeguarding.

And that this girl is clearly deeply disturbed and would have found another vulnerable victim - who may not have been trans - if Brianna hadn't have been available.

Being extremely vulnerable was because of being trans. They go hand in hand. You can't separate the two. Bullies target the most vulnerable. That's the nature of bullying.

The council arguably failed in its duty of care by effectively having Brianna in a situation where they were put at high risk. Is it appropriate for kids with this level of anxiety to be put in the same place as kids with behavioural issues of this nature?

All we have here is a mentality of dumping all the problem kids in one place without actual thought given to their individual needs and without thought to risk management.

It's fucking disgusting.

Yesterday we had emails flying around various community groups because we know local kids who know the killers and these groups are concerned about the impact on these kids with the names coming out.

To hear the background stories, of what other people knew had gone on before, is utterly appalling. Some will feel like they 'could have done more' and that's just wrong. This is a clear safeguarding fail.

No one will be held accountable though.

I’m shocked that the head had only met Scarlett a ’couple of times’ despite her arriving at the school as a managed transfer having been accused of a transgression that was criminal in nature, not just poor behaviour. You’d hope a head would be more involved with a child with that on their record.

why the fuck was the expelled kid being taught in the same facility as the vulnerable kid with extreme anxiety?

my son spent a year in a PRU that was specifically for physically or mentally unwell children, completely separate to the PRUs used for children who have been excluded from mainstream due to poor behaviour, why has Brianna’s school thrown both groups of kids together?

Also, on the AIBU thread someone posted this, saying it’s Eddie’s dad:

https://www.wigantoday.net/news/crime/borough-man-accused-of-indecent-exposure-and-making-an-indecent-image-4488018

@RedToothBrush It's fucking bonkers: let's put the kid with a known history of bullying and harming with the kid with anxiety who is trans. And then not tell the school about the full nature of the reasons for expulsion.

Who the fucking hell thought that was a good idea?

This is why I have doubts about the policy (in Ireland) of not identifying child criminals. I understand the kindly impulse that wants to make rehabilitation possible / easier, but victims and potential victims need to be considered as well.

I suspect Brianna was vulnerable to bullying and abuse long before transition because of the eyesight problems - the thick distorting lenses are even more visible in the most recent image released. We had a threat recently about a child's glasses being repeatedly broken, and both the OP on that thread, and some of the replies, made it clear how much children with sight problems that require glasses can still be targetted at school - and how horribly vulnerable they are. Being anxious is a rational response to that.

This. The reason the judge found that transphobia was a secondary motive is that the boy made dehumanising transphobic comments about Brianna on their private Snapchat, and the girl knew of this attitude and didn't discourage it. Just like the primary motive was her sadism which he also had to a lesser extent and also went along with, but the nature of a joint enterprise crime meant that these were considered the motives for both.

I think people would be shocked if they could see the private WhatsApps and Snapchats of many teens, and the dehumanising way they speak about people they see as "other" eg gay people, women, the disabled, people of other races etc. I imagine the other children he was chatting to were/are concerned that the police know what they themselves were saying.

I think the idea of these comments making him some sort of unusual monster just because he was "transphobic" and also committed a violent murder are naive and show a misplaced faith that the "nice" kids are the ones that go along with gender identity ideology.. The violent fantasies and dehumanisation of others in general are the issue.

Yes, it needs a thorough investigation.

Agree with the posts saying the managed transfer of schools in this case represents a chronic failure of safeguarding.

Sadly, living within the Warrington area myself & having experience of how they deal with square pegs in round holes, I cannot say I’m surprised in the slightest. Warrington Borough Council’s implementation of their SEND strategy for instance is piss poor in my experience.

Jenkinson should have been sent to a PRU imho after what she did at Culcheth. She should definitely NOT have been sent to another mainstream high school.

Whoever signed this managed transfer off should be sacked & maybe even the Director of Children’s services should go as well.

How did Eddie, and these other children, learn to view and talk about others like that?

This isn't a universal childhood experience.

I didn't talk about other kids like that at school. Many children talked about me like that but not all did. They didn't spontaneously invent it. They learned it from adults in their lives; from things they watched on tv and read online.

Transphobia is a learned behaviour.

I didn't talk about other kids like that at school.

That's either a remarkably rose-tinted perspective or you attended a remarkable school.

Children have always 'othered' and bullied. Ask anyone with a difference (even hair colour or degree of coil or curl). Anyone who has a disability or was mocked for their uniform being so big on them that it didn't fit them for another 5 years.

I had classmates at the age of 6 who would attempt to stab other classmates with scissors. They could whirlwind through and destroy the fittings of an entire classroom. They spoke very disparagingly of others.

Different language, still the same instinct to other and destroy. There is nothing new here.

I wish there were a way to prevent bullying within schools. I wish there were a way to prevent children being exposed to undesirable homelives and environments. We seem to be unable to address these issues.

You don’t know what people say/said in private, Hatch, we only ever know what people say to our faces (or what is evidenced in court).

what do you think the men’s locker room chat is like in an MMA gym?

Eddie’s dad is now on remand for child sex abuse images.

As a secondary teacher, I can assure that WhatsApp groups are an absolute cesspit of abuse for everything you can imagine. It's the same bullying and othering that has gone on in schools since time began (I was bullied both for having a posh accent and for being poor...) but the ability to type rather than say these things seems to have ramped the abuse up to 11.

Arguably tras by making every. single. thing. transphobic, putting it front and centre. The most marginalised, the most vulnerable. They're responsible for making it the go-to insult for attacking non-conforming kids. Particularly attractive for screwed up kids who are determined to transgress. But if it hadn't been that it would have been something else.

I had no idea about all the backstory, the apparent safeguarding failures with the young girl. I thought this tragedy couldn't shock me any more.

You don’t know what people say/said in private, Hatch, we only ever know what people say to our faces (or what is evidenced in court).

Yes, which was entirely my point. They had a horrific murder of a child by children that everyone is struggling to understand. No one expects their personal WhatsApp chats to be looked at by people hostile to them.

But there are lots of threads on MN where women have seen a chat between their partner and his friends which they weren't part of, and been shocked by the kind of things they are saying/sharing.

I doubt this child will make many front pages unless his murderer turns out to be an asylum seeker who should have been deported

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/03/teenager-convicted-daylight-murder-schoolboy-walthamstow/

Kids, killing kids. Destroying lives, their victims, their own, their family's. So tragic, so senseless.

When I was at school, people were bullied for wearing glasses, having a big nose, different accent etc.

Now I could make some false claim that it must be learned behaviour from adults, TV and online. Basically anything I want censored.

I work in a School with teenagers and some of the comments they make, do make me scared that they will do something horrible. All you can do is report it. But these kids are learning it from friends and family. Also off the internet. They love to watch people fight and most kids will try and film it if they can. It makes me sad because I grew up in the 90's and I'm sure the levels of hate were not there then. Obviously we didn't have many trans children then, but we still had kids who were quite clearly gay.

Hardly a remarkable school, and I wouldn't say there is much danger of rose tint here.

It isn't exactly an alien concept to Mumsnetters that people can't help but be affected by the values and attitudes of the environment they are brought up in, and different children learn empathy and critical thinking skills at different times; some become adults while still struggling to grasp these things and some never manage it. Nor is it a novel concept that different people will negotiate that landscape differently, and the behaviours they develop in response to it are themselves informed by their environment and previous life experiences. If you see adults talking in a particular way about people, you'll incorporate it into your own behaviour unless you've also learned not to.

I can't speak for everyone but I can personally attest that being the target of nigh-universal, systematic playground bullying for most of your school years can (but doesn't always) give you a particularly robust and sober perspective on the true value of treating other people badly.

Admittedly I had a bit of a head start there; racism and ableism were already very much issues on the family radar and being the weird boy who thought he was a girl didn't leave room for the vileness of nascent 90's lad culture. I refused to play the 'pass it along' game even though that refusal only served to aggravate things further. That was when the chants and names escalated to physical violence. Nobody likes a sanctimonious carebear who talks with a different accent to the rest of her class and refuses to bite back, I suppose.

I think you're right that there is an 'any port in a storm' element to the role of hate speech and discriminatory attitudes in bullying - but those are still learned behaviours. If children grow up in an environment where they are, in private or even in public, told by adults that it's ok or even admirable to act in that way - and anyone who is able to access the internet or read the front page of a newspaper right now can't not see that - then how can we expect them not to carry these things through into adulthood?

Sure there's nothing new here; we also don't have to keep repeating the same mistakes.

Can you please stop making threads all about YOU Hatch? It’s really strange behaviour - makes me worry for your wellbeing.

I don't think they are. But it's a good way of not listening to what someone is saying.

"If children grow up in an environment where they are, in private or even in public, told by adults that it's ok or even admirable to act in that way - and anyone who is able to access the internet or read the front page of a newspaper right now can't notsee that - then how can we expect them not to carry these things through into adulthood"

Exactly. Children pick up on attitudes and what they see. It's how boys can become sexist mysognists, racists develop racist attitudes. What they see and hear in society can feed into their behaviour.