Esther Ghey, school phone ban

[Davros]

I heard her on R4’s Today programme this morning. I thought she was great, really impressive. I wonder how far down the rabbit hole Brianna would have gone if this campaign had been around then.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgng2l7d36o.amp

The Radcliffe boy is one thing. He is obviously the product of a horrible upbringing and really undesirable family background. His own parents bought him dangerous weapons and the father is or was in prison on some very dubious convictions.

The girl is another matter. She is a very dangerous psychopath. Sometimes this has little to do with parenting, faulty or otherwise, and her family background appeared perfectly normal. Unfortunately - unpopular a statement though it is these days - I believe some people are born like that.

I agree with a ban in schools. Yes some parents (including myself) find it hard to implement outside of school but some time free of phones is better than nothing! There is a school near me that has banned phones and according to the teachers, morale is a lot better among both students and teachers.

Didn't say anything about how she lost her child.

She didn't protect her child by allowing him unrestricted and unsupervised use of a smart phone. Why is that a harsh thing to say? Use parental controls and no phones in their bedroom until they are 16. It isn't difficult. Even autistic (no proof this child was) children cope better with clear boundaries and expectations.

Like it or not it is poor parenting to not supervise your child and protect them from exposure to the horrible things they can see online without supervision. There is another thread with a 6 year old having unsupervised access to YouTube and her friend seeing something that scared her badly because no one supervises that child. There were 8 year olds in Edinburgh not so long ago receiving explicit photos from an adult man on snapchat. Wouldn't have happened if those children had not been allowed unsupervised and unrestricted use of a smart phone. But of course it's the phone's fault and the apps faults and everyone else's responsibility but not the parents.

Yes, but none of us, or our parenting, is perfect. We don't know the individuals concerned, nor their personal circumstances. It's horribly cruel to judge the mother in this way. She probably blames herself anyway, without the world also casting its stones.

I absolutely agree. None of us is perfect and we can’t protect our children 24 hours a day. It’s easy to look back and say ‘if only ..’ but hey, ‘if only’ there hadn’t been two abhorrent specimens of humanity intent on murdering someone. Where were THEIR parents? Never mind the poor woman who lost her child.

She’s written a book about it, though. So we do know quite a lot, from her, and she doesn’t come out of her own telling well.

However, she clearly knows that and it seems to me that she’s trying her damndest to bring some good out of this horrific situation, and I can commend her for that.

I had to nip this type of activity in the bud at about 12/13 in the first year of DS2 having a phone. No problems since I made it clear that any repeat incidents would lead to the removal of the smart phone. If I could go back in time I would not have let him have one until 13/14 as he clearly wasn’t sensible with it initially. I’d advise letting yours know that if there are any repeats of this he will be annoying the use of a Nokia…

The McCain's appear to have been less than perfect parents too. They made their parenting public. Just like Ms Ghey has.

No one is undermining the horror of losing a child. There are thousands of parents who have lost a child. Many in similar horrible circumstances. I read The Jigsaw Man a few years ago and one case was particularly horrific. Those parents couldn't have done anything previously to protect their baby imo.

These people have made a platform for themselves. People will debate their judgement as a result.

@Tessisme Their parents won't make a public platform as they will be torn to shreds.
Blaming their parenting would be seen as acceptable though. IMO their children shouldn't have had unsupervised access either and their parents couldn't have been clueless about their obsessions.

Yes the same here and it is a brick phone all the way. No third chances.

You may well be right. I think Esther Ghey said she considered the girl to be the more dangerous of the two.

In which case, what Esther is doing with her campaign is more aimed at children like Brianna that his killers, who are presumably beyond this kind of intervention.

It's the girl who's been expressing a desire to kill more people since she went to prison, I think.

Oh absolutely, totally agree. His phone was confiscated entirely for about 3 months afterwards as he clearly couldn't be trusted to use it responsibly.

We eventually gave it back though when I was sometimes struggling to locate him for end of school pick ups. I don't pick him up from school grounds because the school car park gets absolutely rammed with frequent traffic wars between impatient parents. Plus DS wanted to have a bit of independence and walk home, but its a very long walk through some rural lonely parts which I'm not happy for him to walk through. So we compromised and I agreed to let him walk half way where its safe and then I'd pick him up from the local play park. But due to heavy traffic I'd sometimes be a bit late getting back from work. He'd panic and start walking home thinking I'd forgotten him. I'd arrive, find him missing and then go driving round the area also in a panic. In the end it made it far less stressful to just let him have the phone back.

But I bought an app that allows me to control when his phone goes on and off. So I have it set to shut off during school hours. He hates it, apparently it's embarrassing because none of his friends parents do that to them. But he proved he was too immature to not be a prat with it, so the app stays.

Yes, I think she's trying to be very honest, and if she has emotional blinkers I'm not going to criticise her for that.

The impression I get is that Brianna was not just a vulnerable kid but also a very difficult kid who was almost impossible to parent. I think in some ways she can be seen as a domestic abuse victim while at the same time having to be the parent.

She seems to me to be basically a good hearted person, who's been through this terrible loss, whose mind keeps coming back to whether she could have done anything to prevent it, and she feels a need to do something positive.

Dear god.

Yes if smartphones and books had the same features we wouldn't have smartphones.....

Smartphones should never have been allowed in schools. Even conkers are banned in a lot of schools.

Isn't it. She was the one mainly driving events, had already been excluded from one school for some drug-related reason, was the one mainly planning the MO of the murder, and had a story meticulously worked out in the event that they were caught. There was a whole trail of WhatsApp messages showing this in detail.

On the pretext of befriending her would-be victim, she then used this friendship to go ahead and murder Brianna. She then said in court that it had all been an elaborate fantasy and she didn't think for a minute that Radcliffe would actually go ahead and do it. Thankfully she wasn't bargaining on the joint enterprise argument and the intent was clear enough to the jury.

She's extremely cunning, devious and manipulative - particularly in the way she seems able to persuade others to do her dirty work for her. There's no question that if she hadn't been caught she'd have gone on to kill again.

Fifteen years old. How the hell does a person become quite this fucked up at so young an age?

Same at my kids’ high school. The teachers ask them to use their phone browsers to do research in class.

I probably should have expanded on what I was thinking more.

It was two strands, really:

1. Helen Joyce puts it better than me, but the inadvisability of playing along with a child's delusion, when the world probably won't because it's obvious, even at a young age, that they're not the sex they want to be.

1. The size differential: physically I doubt EG could have made him do anything, and I can imagine outbursts being pretty alarming.

Same at my kids’ school. Which is why we need a ban. It’s the only way schools would be obliged to find an alternative.

These things are not insurmountable problems though.

No, but the schools have to be prepared to make the necessary changes.
As I said upthread, DD’s school use pouches but given that they all have some kind of laptop or device for every class, she can just use WhatsApp or Insta on that! So what’s the point of the phone ban???
Schools need to make a decision. Reduce tech use hugely to have a meaningful phone ban - or do a half-arsed job of it.

I knew someone would bring the por MCanns into it.

Do you consider your parenting to be beyond reproach in all ways?

Poor McCanns? They repeatedly left their three children under 5 alone in a holiday apartment in a foreign country with the door unlocked.

Everyone makes parenting mistakes. Buggering off with friends for dinner instead of at least one adult staying with sleeping children isn't one of them.

It was predictable. But I'm reminded more of another mother - Sylvia Lancaster - who used her daughter's horrific murder to start an education campaign.

If the McCanns' awful situation had one positive outcome, it's made leaving kids in hotel rooms or using a hotel 'babysitting' service an absolute no-no. It's now taboo. That said, leaving prams in front of shops, or that Butlin's 'baby crying in Chalet #X' service horrified my mother, even decades ago. Way to advertise that your child is behind a flimsy, insubstantial partition wall on their own.

I was of the same mind on smartphones without needing a stark warning like this, but if anything else was needed to convince me that they were a really bad idea, this tragic case was it. Perhaps Esther Ghey's campaigining will have a similar effect. I hope so.