Richard Madeley calls for parents' right to go through their child's social media sites

If a parent suspects their child has something they shouldn’t hidden in, say, their school bag, then they have every right and responsibility to rummage for it. Ditto bedroom drawers, wardrobe, pockets, etc.

Yet I learned to my astonishment this week that parents have no automatic right to look at their son or daughter’s social media messaging sites. It’s deemed an invasion of their privacy. Access denied. No password? No entry. Computer says no.

Given that social media has turned out to be one of the biggest threats to children’s mental health anyone could have conceived of even as recently as a decade ago, this is an absurd situation. But it holds – even in the most extreme cases.

Such as that of Ellen Roome, a bereaved mother who has absolutely no idea why her son Jools took his own life aged just 14.

A coroner was unable to rule that Jools’s death was a suicide because there was zero evidence the teenager was in a “suicidal mood”; in fact, just the opposite – he was in excellent spirits generally and especially so on the day he died.

“An hour or so before he left us, there’s a video of him saying good-bye to a friend,’ says Ellen. “He was absolutely fine; upbeat and cheerful.”

There was no note. Meanwhile, police could find no shred of any third-party involvement. Ellen, from Cheltenham, says her boy never displayed the slightest sign of depression. So what on earth happened on that dreadful day in April, 2022?

She thinks the answer may lie in his social media accounts – both the content that is still there to be read, but any deleted history too. Ellen wonders if he read something that encouraged him to take his own life, whether perhaps he tried a risky social media “challenge” that went horribly wrong. (This, as we know all too well, can happen.)

So far her attempts to gain access to Jools’s accounts have been unsuccessful. Ellen has asked a string of social media companies used by her son for his browsing history, to try to understand why he died. To date, she’s received no meaningful data from any of them. This week an online petition supporting her attempts to prise information from internet providers garnered more than 100,000 signatures. That means the issue can be debated in Parliament. So Ellen is slowly getting there.

But her struggle begs even wider questions. Whatever she may discover, it won’t bring her beloved boy back. But what if he were still alive and Ellen had developed concerns about his browsing habits? What if he refused to let her look at his iPhone or tablet? It could be, literally, a matter of life and death – yet even as his mother, she would be denied independent access to her child’s accounts.

This is absolutely crazy. If you agree, please write to your MP (it’s too late to sign the petition). Ellen needs all the help we can give her.