Dark web’s malevolence is debasing young minds
IT WAS one of the most haunting, most heartbreaking details to emerge during the Ana Kriegel murder trial. On a sunny Monday evening in May of 2018, Ana’s mother Geraldine came home from work and asked her husband Patric where Ana was. Her 14-year-old daughter had been trying to ring her that afternoon, but when Mrs Kriegel called back she got no answer. Patric told her that the doorbell had rung at around 5 o’clock and, to his surprise, there was a teenage boy at the door looking for Ana. He told her not to be long, but she looked so happy he let her go, pleased she was going out with a friend.
But Geraldine Kriegel was ‘immediately concerned’, she told the court. ‘Nobody calls for Ana. She had no friends.’
Pattern
The desperately sad portrait of a lonely girl, of her parents’ concern for her isolation, of their conflicting feelings of relief and anxiety when she appeared to have made a friend unfurled again, last week, at the sentencing of Brianna Ghey’s killers.
In fact, the parallels between the two cases, five years apart, are beyond coincidental: they are terrifying. Because now we know that Ana’s murder wasn’t just a onceoff, a horrific aberration, but perhaps part of an emerging pattern with one common denominator: the internet. A new poll shows that almost a quarter of six-yearolds now have their own smartphone – how many more warnings are we going to need before recognising the incalculable harm that such devices, and the easy access they offer to the horrors of the dark web, are inflicting on impressionable young minds?
Brianna and Ana were both vulnerable teenagers. They were both callously identified by their killers precisely for their loneliness and craving for friendship. They were both lured to a cruel, torturous and premeditated slaughter by other children who posed as their friends. In both cases, the two children who planned and conspired to murder their victims had for years been roaming the most malign sewers of the internet, viewing extreme porn and barbaric violence. And in both cases, the murderers’ parents, good people providing good homes for their beloved children, simply hadn’t a clue where those children went, each day after school, when they headed off to their bedrooms with their phones and their laptops.
The judge sentencing Brianna’s killers took the decision to name the culprits, something we may yet see here following that significant court ruling in the Cameron Blair case. Almost incredibly, the instigator of Brianna Ghey’s murder, in February of 2023, was a girl of 15. Stripped of her anonymity, we now know that Scarlett Jenkinson came from a stable, respectable family. She has three older brothers, her mother teaches food and design technology, and her father runs a building firm.
But at around age 13 she began exploring extreme content on the dark web, viewing bloodshed and violent porn, obsessing about serial killers and fantasising about murder. Similarly, the 13-year-old who instigated Ana Kriegel’s murder and sexual assault, Boy A, had more than 12,000 pornographic images, including child and animal porn, on his mobile phone.
Brianna Ghey was a transgender girl diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder, ADHD and anxiety. Instead of taking part in normal classes in her school, she received one-to-one tuition in an ‘inclusion room’, and that was where she met Jenkinson, who had been transferred from her previous school for trying to poison a classmate. It was there she’d befriended Eddie Ratcliffe, a highly intelligent boy who planned to study microbiology. His mother is a ski instructor and graphic designer, and his father runs a truck company. In their online conversations she told him how she’d become ‘obsessed’ with Brianna.
The court heard she was sexually excited by the thought of murdering Brianna, and even talked of taking one of her ‘pretty eyes’ as a macabre souvenir. At her direction, Ratcliffe bought the knife used to stab Brianna 28 times, after they’d lured her to a quiet part of a local park, with Jenkinson impatiently snatching it from him to finish the job.
On the way to the meeting, Brianna had texted her mother to say she was anxious about getting the bus alone. ‘I was pleased to receive the text from Brianna telling me she was going out to meet her friend… this was a big breakthrough for her,’ her mum said in her victim impact statement last week. ‘I thought she would have a wonderful time, hanging around with her friend and getting some fresh air. When all the time she was being lured to her death…’
Toxic
Jenkinson told schoolfriends that she was a ‘satanist’ and Boy B, in the Kriegel case, was found to have satanic drawings in his copybook. Boy B also had disturbing drawings and writings in his copybooks, showing a fascination with violent imagery.
A page from a copybook produced at Jenkinson’s trial contained detailed handwritten plans for Brianna’s murder, carried out almost to the letter.
There seems no doubt that these youngsters’ access to toxic online content was a major factor in their crimes, and yet this area remains unregulated, and repeated red flags have gone unheeded. A year before Ana’s murder, a 15-year-old Dublin boy, again from a stable, respectable family, almost decapitated a woman he’d met online and lured to a quiet location in Dún Laoghaire; he, too, told gardaí he’d been looking at violent porn, from the age of 12.
Brianna Ghey’s mother is now calling for special smartphones, with no apps or social media access, for under-16s, and also for parents’ phones to receive notifications when their children search for inappropriate material.
Even if she’s successful, though, any such measure will be too late for Brianna, and too late for Ana. Terrifyingly, it may be too late for all of us.