Esther Ghey wasn’t sure she was would be strong enough to address the crowd at Warrington’s Golden Square on Sunday.
More than a thousand people had gathered to remember her daughter, Brianna, exactly a year after she was murdered in a nearby park. Some knew Brianna from school or a local youth group for transgender children, but many had never met the sassy, sharp-tongued 16-year-old. All were united in sorrow for a life cut short.
A few of Brianna’s friends read out tributes, remembering going shopping for hair dye in Barbie pyjamas, being guinea pigs for her makeup “looks”, or spending hours building virtual worlds on Minecraft. Seeing them speak gave Ghey the strength she needed to take to the stage and remember her “amazing, unique and joyful teenager”.
A day on from the vigil, Ghey met the Guardian for an interview to reflect on Brianna’s life and death, and what she hopes will be her daughter’s legacy.
Brianna would have loved the anniversary event, she said, particularly when the crowd turned on their phone torches and lifted them in the air for a two-minute silence. “If she could see from wherever she is now, I think she would have been happy,” said Ghey. Brianna always wanted to be famous.
Many have watched Ghey with increasing awe since she stood on the steps at Manchester crown court just before Christmas and urged “some empathy and compassion” for the families of the teenagers responsible for killing Brianna.
It came minutes after a jury had found the 16-year-olds Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe guilty of what the judge later called an “exceptionally brutal killing”. Ghey said she had lost all sympathy for the teenagers because of their total lack of remorse, but said she felt sorry for their parents: “They too have lost a child and must live the rest of their lives knowing what their child has done.”
After they were sentenced, she went further, saying she would be open to meeting Jenkinson’s mother, after her family issued a statement saying they were “truly sorry” for the 16-year-old’s actions.
Ghey said mindfulness helps her to look beyond her own grief and empathise with others, saying it helps “build mental resilience and it develops your empathy and your self compassion”.
She does not hate Jenkinson or Ratcliffe, she said. “When you’ve got a certain level of self-compassion, you won’t have harmful emotions that you know will really hurt yourself. I know that if I carried hate, they’ll just be getting on with their own life. They don’t know; they can’t feel my hate. I don’t want to waste my energy on that.”
Her focus is on the future. “I think that society at the moment is in a bit of a mess and I just want to be able to make things better for people.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to cry. But I’ve got another daughter who’s 19 and potentially I’ll be a grandparent one day and I just want society to be better for my grandchild.”
Ghey, who worked as a food technologist until Brianna’s murder, now has two goals: to introduce mindfulness to schools across the UK – a mission for which she has already raised over £95,000 – and more ambitiously, to reform the internet.
She is calling for stricter controls on social media access for under-16s, believing Brianna would be alive if her killers had not been able to access violent content online, including the dark web. She also thinks that Brianna would have been a much happier, less anxious teenager if it wasn’t for social media.
Brianna came out as trans when she was 14 and had just moved to a new school. She confided first in her older sister, Alisha, and then gradually adopted a female identity. Her family successfully persuaded her not to choose Britney as her new name, but were otherwise supportive of her transition.
Brianna received lots of support from her family and school, Ghey said. “Brianna’s friends were supportive, the school bent over backwards to accommodate exactly what Brianna wanted.”
Being treated as a girl made Brianna happy. Social media did not. She built up a large TikTok following and would run downstairs excitedly every time one of her videos “blew up”, but behind the sassy front was a mentally ill young woman suffering from a serious eating disorder.
Aged 15, she was diagnosed with attention hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and was hospitalised after her weight dropped dangerously low. These conditions made Brianna vulnerable, believes her mother, because it restricted her ability to identify when she was in danger.
Though ultimately she was murdered by someone she thought was her friend – Brianna met Jenkinson in the “inclusivity unit” at Birchwood high school – Ghey worried immensely about the life her “extremely vulnerable” daughter was living online.
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They had “massive battles” over Brianna’s mobile phone, she said, with Brianna changing her passcode on her 16th birthday so that her mother could not check up on her.
But Ghey knew enough to be worried, after Brianna began idolising an anorexic influencer and her weight plummeted further. “I think she probably saw that she [the influencer] had so many likes and that people were following her and encouraging her to be thin, and she thought: ‘I want to do it, I want to be famous.’”
Ghey blames social media for encouraging insecurities, “portraying the perfect body image and the perfect life and airbrushed filters”.
She worried that Brianna’s self worth became ever more entwined with how many “likes” she was receiving online, as well as the transphobic abuse that came hand-in-hand with the praise.
“We’re taking our young people’s childhood away from them in a way by letting them live their lives online and be influenced by whoever is out there,” she said.
After Brianna’s murder, Ghey realised to her horror that she was following pro-anorexia and self-harm accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Since she began speaking out, she has started to receive “really horrible transphobic messages aimed towards Brianna” on the site. “I actually reported one on Twitter and they came back and said they’re not doing anything wrong,” she said, aghast.
She said she was keen to meet any boss of a tech firm but particularly X, which is owned by Elon Musk. “I think Twitter has got a lot to answer for,” she said.
She said she didn’t blame the parents of Brianna’s killers because she knows how hard it is to police a teenager’s internet access.
“Both Scarlett and Eddie were old enough to know exactly what they were doing. And I think that especially in this day and age, it’s so difficult to monitor your child and our children, or our teenagers, are their own people. They’re an individual, you can’t completely control an individual person. You can’t control their thoughts.
“I know how difficult it is: Brianna was looking at self-harm sites and anorexia sites and I failed to know that so no, I don’t blame them. They are going through such a horrific time too, and they’ve not only lost a child, they’ve also got that shame to carry with them for the rest of their lives.”
