Brianna’s mum is so right about lockdown’s toxic legacy

DRIVING my son back to university recently, we got chatting about lockdown. In between bites of Costa cheese and ham toasties (favourite service station treat), he said how much he enjoyed that time. Being away from the world and able to manage his own timetable, not having to get up at the crack of dawn for school, having an excuse not to say ‘yes’ to every party. It had been like an extended holiday and he missed it.

Such thoughts are quite common for young adults like my son – loved, safe, generally a bit of a homebody anyway. Indeed, research has shown that 32 per cent of 18- to 24year-olds said they felt happier during lockdown. By contrast, older adults weren’t quite so nostalgic – not least, I suspect, because having entire families at home together meant much more washing, cooking and cleaning. To this day, the dread words ‘What’s for lunch?’ bring me out in a panic.

One reason, I think, that this age group coped so well in lockdown is that many were just about mature enough to navigate the internet without coming to much harm. They enjoyed all the advantages without being too vulnerable to the dangers.

But for one group, replacing real life with a virtual one was not so healthy. In an agonisingly poignant interview in Friday’s Daily Mail, Brianna Ghey’s mother, Esther, spoke about how lockdown devastated her daughter’s mental health.

As a key worker, Esther often had to leave her daughter – 14 at the time – at home alone with just her phone for company. ‘She was living in this online world,’ Esther said. ‘She wasn’t socialising face-to-face with people and, as I now know, she was looking at things that were quite disturbing.’

Brianna developed an eating disorder and began to self-harm. At one point she was even hospitalised because her weight dropped so low. It was only later, following her daughter’s murder, that Esther discovered Brianna had been visiting ‘disgusting’ pro-anorexia and self-harm sites.

Around the same time, Brianna began questioning her gender, perhaps in part encouraged by prominent online influencers.

Brianna’s mother says that none of this came as a huge surprise, since she already felt her daughter was questioning her sexuality and was far more at ease in the company of girls than with boys. Brianna even tried becoming a TikTok star herself, acquiring more than 30,000 followers with her posts about being a trans teen.

But the irony was that, as confident as she was online, Brianna struggled offline with social anxiety, not wanting to leave the house and often spending entire days in her room. When the lockdown ended, she found it hard to return to school, not because she was worried about being bullied for her new identity (she wasn’t) but just because she felt uncomfortable being around so many people after so long on her own.

It was this lack of confidence and sense of insecurity in the real world that, sadly, made her so vulnerable to her killers, and in particular to Scarlett Jenkinson, whom Brianna saw as a friend. There is a cruel irony that when Brianna told her mum she was meeting a new friend, Esther was ‘really happy’.

But if Brianna was affected directly by lockdown, it also played a part, indirectly, in her death.

Her killers had experienced the same conditions – though drawn down a much darker route. Their time in isolation surely contributed to turning them into ruthless predators, desensitised by the terrible things that they saw online, and detached from reality.

The awful truth about lockdown is that in trying to protect one vulnerable group from a physical illness, another equally vulnerable group were exposed to a whole set of other dangers. And Brianna is not the only victim. At the height of lockdown in 2020/21, 233 children died from abuse or neglect – up from 188 the previous year.

Children such as ten-month-old Finley Boden, killed by his parents on Christmas Day, or Jacob Crouch, also ten months old, who died at the hands of his stepfather.

Also, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, captured on CCTV footage crying for help from his grandmother and uncle and saying, ‘Nobody loves me’, too weak to lift his own bedclothes after months of unbearably cruel abuse at the hands of his father and his partner. Like Brianna, we should not forget them.

Her mother is right to point out the damage caused by lockdown, just as she is right to call for a ban on smartphones for the under-16s.

Let us hope, for once, that those who make the rules take notice.

IT’S such a shame Prince Harry’s dash to see his father didn’t result in something more positive than a half-hour meeting. If a crisis such as this can’t thaw the (understandable) froideur between them, it’s hard to see what can.