Our children’s minds are being poisoned by the Dark Web. If we don’t protect them, who will?
Two powerful voices on the lessons we must all learn after the sickening murder of Brianna Ghey
FOR any parent or grandparent, being aware of what your teenager is doing on the internet is now as vital for their safety as knowing if they are drinking alcohol or taking drugs. As a cyber-security expert – who is also a parent – I’d argue it’s more important still. The twisted sites that any computer-literate teen can access via a phone, tablet or laptop are capable of leaving lifelong mental scars.
Still worse are the layers of perversion and gore on the Dark Web. To an older and more sheltered generabeen tion, these are beyond our sickest imagination. It was these that Brianna Ghey’s killer Scarlett Jenkinson began to explore aged just 13, as she spiralled into drug abuse and murder fantasies.
Not all teenagers, by any means, who experience these horrors will try to act out what they see. But what they encounter can never be unseen. They are at risk of lasting damage to their mental health, with their emotions infected by images that could haunt them for ever.
During a long career in journalism I have seen desperately unpleasant things. Few were worse than the website I was able to find and access within ten minutes of downloading an anonymous Dark Web browser to my home computer last week.
For obvious reasons, I will not name the site. It served up an alphabetic directory of the most virulent pornography, from A for amputees to Z for zombies: images of violent sex involving seemingly helpless, legless and armless people, followed by similar images of skeletal anorexia sufferers— and that was just under A. This isn’t even the worst of what can be found on these sites.
Jenkinson had boasted to her fellow killer, Eddie Ratcliffe: ‘I love watching torture vids. Real ones on the Dark Web.’
Because Dark Web activity is untraceable, it is impossible to know what Jenkinson had seen. But it is plausible that she managed to access a ‘red room’ – a site featuring videos, either live-streamed or pre-recorded, of barbaric bloodshed. These can include cannibalism, vivisection and murder.
Despite widespread rumours that these sites exist, few people have prosecuted in relation to them. Some sceptics dismiss them as an ‘urban myth’ and suggest that videos that appear to show torture or murder, for example, might be faked using special effects.
Digital trickery is one possibility, it’s true, but in the poorest places of the world, such as parts of India and the Philippines, lives of street children and homeless adults are treated as almost worthless. It would be cheaper there to kill a human being and film it than to fake it. Child abuse, live on camera, perpetrated on unknown victims by anonymous perpetrators, has been a target for detectives for decades.
It’s horrific to think what harm these videos could do to an innocent and unformed psyche, just as it is appalling to know that the people depicted have almost certainly been forced into sexual activity by poverty, coercion or deception.
Since the early days of the internet, such sites have existed, catering for adults with depraved, criminal urges. Frequently the people producing these images, as well as their customers, ran the risk of detection and arrest, given away by their own stupidity and lack of internet savvy. They used credit cards, registered sites in their own names or failed to realise cyber-specialists can recognise the fingerprint of an individual computer.
If they were celebrities, such as Gary Glitter, we read about them. Others faced humiliation and the disgust of their families or employers. That is no longer the case.
The browser I used is effectively foolproof. Anyone with a computer or smartphone can download it. It leaves no trace, imposing total anonymity. There is no search engine. Instead, each page has an address of random numbers and letters, like a password.
Reaching that site involves knowing where to look — information shared among friends, via social media or in internet chatrooms.
Scarlett Jenkinson sent Ratcliffe an advert for a site claiming to show footage of people being tortured, maimed and killed. On entering an address, a simple mouse-click prompts a complex chain of events.
Your request is pinged between relay stations, each wrapping your identity in a layer of impenetrable disguise. This is the ‘onion’ principle. The technical details are complicated, but the key point is simple: there is no good reason for anyone in the UK to use this software – only a multitude of bad reasons.
If you find a browser called Tor on your teenager’s device, demand an explanation. What are they using it for? Who told them to download it? Don’t be fobbed off with vague claims that ‘it’s more private’ or ‘there are fewer ads’.
The paradox is that this instrument of misery was conceived with the best of intentions.
The Tor browser, with its safe access to the Dark Web, was designed not to enable the trade in porn and drugs – nor its multifarious other grim uses, such as anorexia cult sites where girls are encouraged to starve themselves to death, or forums where hitmen purportedly sell their deadly services.
‘Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship,’ proclaims the website, where the browser can be downloaded free of charge in seconds.
The software was developed with grants from the Pentagon to give people living under oppression and dictatorship, for example in China, North Korea, Iran or Russia, a means to access news from the West.
The BBC maintains a mirror of its own site on the Dark Web, providing reliable journalism to users whose lives depend on the secrecy this supplies. Even Beijing’s secret police cannot trace Dark Web activity by its individual citizens.
But as with the wider internet, this optimistic beginning was soon corrupted. Just as no one foresaw social media could be used to undermine democratic elections with conspiracy theories, the potential for organised crime and extreme porn emerged only later. It has mushroomed into a multi-billion pound criminal marketplace threatening security and our mental health.
Payment for these services is in untraceable digital currency such as bitcoin. Much of the trade is fraudulent – but if you don’t get what you pay for, you are hardly likely to complain, let alone file a lawsuit.
According to the Internet Watch Foundation, more than 730 sites devoted to child abuse images appeared on the Dark Web in 2020.
Psychologists have warned that the sheer horror of these images can cause rapid desensitisation.
Some users, after the first shock of revulsion, seek out even more vile images. This mental ennui is coupled with another psychological effect: ‘disassociation’. Because the
What teens encounter cannot be unseen and could haunt them for ever
No generation of children has ever been at greater risk of corruption
video is just a moving picture and the people involved are strangers, none of it seems real.
Professor Alan Woodward, a computer science and cyber-security specialist from Surrey University, told the Mail’s podcast on the murder of Brianna Ghey, The Trial: ‘They see people doing it or they might do something softer online and no one comes knocking at their door, so they carry out a frenzied attack and they don’t think of the consequences because they are still living in that online virtual world.’
That appears to be what happened to Scarlett Jenkinson. Aged ten, she seemed an ordinary girl to her family. But by 13 she was addicted to horror movies, first on Netflix and then via darker portals. At 15, she was a merciless killer.
No generation of children has ever been at greater risk of corruption. We may hope that undercover detective work and cyber-sleuths at GCHQ will eventually bust the business model of these monsters.
But for now, the best chance our children have is the vigilance of their families and teachers, most of all their parents. If we don’t keep them safe, who will?
Edward Lucas is the author of Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust,
Security and the Internet