Brianna: A Mother’s Story Review – Certainly this documentary exploiter should not have been made | Television

IYou can create a cynical piece of television without anyone appearing on the screen that has a drop of toxicity in the veins. Documentaries with subjects torn by the titles are particularly likely candidates; The documentaries who recently centered, in a frightening way in mourning even more.

We therefore turn to Brianna: a story of a mother. Brianna is Brianna Ghey, the sixteen year old who was in 2023 assassinated in a premeditated attack To two old men of 15 years-Scarlett Jenkinson, whom Brianna considered a friend, and Jenkinson’s friend (if this is the correct word for what seems more carefully to have been a murderous partnership between two disturbed individuals) Eddie Ratcliffe. They attracted Brianna to a park, then stabbed it 28 times. Det Super Adam Waller of the Cheshire Police claims to have still fought with “the level of depravation” on display in the attack. Brianna’s friends, still in their adolescence, remember that “he was kind, fun, he could always make you feel better” and as “he brought me comfort”. They share videos full of energies and youth, youth laughter.

The mother is Esther Ghey, who now makes a campaign for online protections for young people and better support for mental health in schools. Brianna had moved to a new school in February 2020 after being bullied. According to the principal, Emma Mills, Brianna was eager to make “a new beginning”.

Then came the block. Esther describes Brianna who retires to an online world – using several accounts, so Esther could never be sure what was going on – and talking to people and accessing the material he made Esther “fear that I would find her and Alicia (Brianna’s sister) raped and assassinated”. So Brianna “started to grow her hair and came out as a trans just before returning to school”.

Esther’s pain is still so raw – has not reached the stage in which it can speak of Brianna without crying – that makes you want that there was someone who made a campaign for greater television regulation. It should be forbidden to film someone when they are clearly still in the grip of the most terrible misery. Clearly, however, the decision to take part was that of Esther – and he felt able to do it, as he did when he gave An in -depth interview to the Guardian in February.

But the important thing on television is the first. And the more the pain is pain, the better it sounds, in terms of production. So what we get is that at the parade. Everything that could add depth or meaning or allow us to learn or draw conclusions is not included.

We do not learn what or to Brianna has been exposed online. The coverage of the judicial case is minimal. We discover that Jenkinson was obsessed with torture videos and remain with the impression that Ratcliffe was more a follower of a leader (although they were his clothes that were covered by Brianna’s blood and from his home in which the murder weapon was found), but no adequate analysis of their roles was undertaken. Ratcliffe’s anti-transgender messages are mentioned and there is a video of the judge who cites hatred for trans people as secondary motivation, but it is not clear that this has been attributed only to Ratcliffe. Jenkinson seems to have been fixed on Brianna and said after his condemnation that he tried to kill her (at the beginning by poisoning her with painkillers in a McDonald between McDonald) because she feared that her friend would leave her.

Knowing how to weigh and order the parts carried out by the various problems is impossible. There is a powerful interview with a former senior engineer at Meta, Arturo Béjarwho resigned when his warnings on the damage made by the algorithms that are needed more and more dark content to children and curious teenagers have been ignored. He says that, with the will to do so, feeds could be appropriately limited by companies “within a year”. But its segment is short and there is no time to devote to the way this can be inculcated, nor to look at the reluctance of governments to regulate the internet for the public good.

In short, there is nothing that this documentary makes useful, or that makes it seem other than an exploitation of the unjust sadness of a family. The best that you can hope for is that it is so Anodyne that there is no repercussions that hurts these people suffering further.