The mother of a murder victim is absolutely the last person to be involved in making new laws.
The mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey has spoken with the Prime Minister to discuss online safety.
Esther Ghey had a video meeting with Rishi Sunak and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan to discuss her campaign to develop mindfulness skills in schools.
She hopes to drive better safeguarding on mobile phones and social media.
Ms Ghey hailed the meeting as “really productive” and said it had “opened up a positive line of communication”.
The whole point of the law and the judicial process is that it is dispassionate. Involving victims brings in emotion. Now, if I had my way, the person(s) who stole my bikes would be crucified with razor wire while being disembowelled with a rusty pen knife. I’m not sure that would get past parliament, though. But that’s my point. As a victim of crime, I felt emotionally involved to the point where my views on how these crimes should be tackled are no longer valid. You simply end up with bad law. It’s not as if we don’t have prior experience, because we do.
A woman who fought for a ban on violent online pornography after her daughter’s murder has said she is disappointed it has not been more effective.
Liz Longhurst welcomed the legislative change preventing the possession of some extreme pornography when it was introduced in 2009.
In 2003 her daughter, Brighton music teacher Jane Longhurst, was strangled by Graham Coutts, of Hove, Sussex.
Coutts, who was obsessed with violent pornography, was jailed for life.
The ban became part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, and anyone caught with sexually violent images faces up to three years in jail.
This was a dreadful piece of knee-jerk legislation that banned the ownership of images of consensual acts because one woman wanted to punish everyone for the death of her daughter. Fortunately, it has since been watered down following a campaign by some of those affected.
Ms Ghey is campaigning for an age limit for smartphone usage and stricter controls on access to social media apps.
Waste of time. Won’t work. This is shroud waving at its worst. An empty gesture that solves nothing.
Mrs Ghey has suffered a terrible loss. She should be grieving privately, not courting the media and politicians in order to further restrict the liberties of perfect strangers. Access by minors to the Internet is a parental matter, not a government one.
’As a victim of crime, I felt emotionally involved to the point where my views on how these crimes should be tackled are no longer valid. You simply end up with bad law.’
We seem to end up with that when they aren’t involved as well!
I’m confused. Can you explain why the punishment you proposed for bike thieves would be bad?
Oh, I don’t think it’s at all bad. However, my response is emotional, having suffered personally. I suspect that the man on the Clapham omnibus would disagree somewhat, thinking that maybe, just maybe, it’s a tad OTT.
There is a current mindset that, if you suffer some personal trauma, then your best way of dealing with the downside/grief/whatever is to mount a ‘campaign’ for something vaguely related to your case. It may not achieve anything material, but you’ll feel better because you’ve ‘done something’, it’s therapy, pure and simple.
The media, of course, encourage all these cases as it delivers regular heart-string tweaking output at little cost. The media, of course, don’t actually care about the issue, just the airtime, column inches etc. But the very fact of having the media apparently pay court to the ‘sufferer’ adds even more value to their public therapy session.
The real sadness is that folk don’t now seem to be able to handle life’s random downsides without such public therapy and that other folk can’t see it.