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3 days ago
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It is possible to make a cynical piece of television without anyone who appears on screen having a drop of toxicity in their veins. Documentaries with subjects ripped from the headlines are particularly likely candidates; documentaries centring the recently, appallingly bereaved even more so.
We turn, then, to Brianna: A Mother’s Story. Brianna is Brianna Ghey, the 16-year-old who in 2023 was murdered in a premeditated attack by two 15-year‑olds – Scarlett Jenkinson, whom Brianna considered a friend, and Jenkinson’s friend (if that is the correct word for what seems more accurately to have been a murderous partnership between two disturbed individuals) Eddie Ratcliffe. They lured Brianna to a park, then stabbed her 28 times. Det Supt Adam Waller of Cheshire police says he still wrestles with “the level of depravity” on display in the attack. Brianna’s friends, still in their teens, remember that “she was kind, funny, could always make you feel better” and how “she brought me comfort”. They share videos full of giddy, youthful energy and laughter.
The mother is Esther Ghey, who now campaigns for online protections for young people and better mental health support in schools. Brianna had transferred to a new school in February 2020 after being bullied. According to the headteacher, Emma Mills, Brianna was keen to make “a fresh start”.
Then came lockdown. Esther describes Brianna retreating into an online world – using several accounts, so Esther could never quite be sure what was going on – and talking to people and accessing material that made Esther “afraid I was going to find her and Alicia [Brianna’s sister] raped and murdered”. Then Brianna “started growing her hair and came out as trans just before going back to school”.
Esther’s grief is still so raw – she has not reached the stage where she can talk about Brianna without crying – that it makes you wish there was someone campaigning for greater television regulation, too. It should be forbidden to film someone when they are clearly still in the throes of the most awful misery. Clearly, though, the decision to take part was Esther’s – and she felt able to do so, as she did when she gave an in-depth interview to the Guardian in February.
But the important thing in television is to be first. And the rawer the pain, the better it plays, in production terms. So what we get is that on parade. Anything that could add depth or meaning, or allow us to learn or draw conclusions, is not included.
We do not learn what or whom Brianna was exposed to online. The coverage of the court case is minimal. We learn that Jenkinson was obsessed with torture videos and are left with the impression that Ratcliffe was more of a follower than a leader (although it was his clothes that were covered in Brianna’s blood and his house in which the murder weapon was found), but no proper parsing of their roles is undertaken. Ratcliffe’s anti-transgender messages are quoted and there is footage of the judge citing hatred of trans people as a secondary motivation, but it is not made clear that this was attributed to Ratcliffe only. Jenkinson seems to have been fixated on Brianna and said after her conviction that she tried to kill her (at first by poisoning her with painkillers in a McDonald’s milkshake) because she was afraid her friend was going to leave her.
Knowing how to weight and sort the parts played by the various issues is impossible. There is a powerful interview with a former senior engineer at Meta, Arturo Béjar, who resigned when his warnings about the harm being done by the algorithms serving up ever darker content to curious children and teens were ignored. He says that, with the will to do so, feeds could be appropriately circumscribed by companies “within a year”. But his segment is brief and there is no time given to how this will can be inculcated, nor to looking at governments’ unwillingness to regulate the internet for the public good.
In short, there is nothing that makes this documentary worthwhile, or that makes it feel like anything but an exploitation of a family’s unutterable sadness. The best that can be hoped is that it is so anodyne that there is no backlash that hurts these suffering people further.
