Grieving parents to be given right to access child’s social media, Labour says

12 comments

1. Yikes this is going to go so wrong. Truth is most parents have no idea what their child is up to and seeing the truth might be… I dunno.

   I’m just thinking back to when I was 12+ living in a rough area, some of the things parents might see their daughter’s talking about/ photos sent might be too much.

   For suicides I suppose this would be good for closure but this shouldn’t be a general rule.

2. >It would allow parents whose children die to see if they had accessed harmful content online.

   That .. is potentially an extraordinarily bad idea. Hands up who thinks grieving parents will go ‘nope, nothing out of the ordinary online, maybe it was us’ …

3. This isn’t a great idea. Realistically, they’re going to find something on the big scary Internet to pin it on, even if it makes no sense.

4. The article is very unclear on the qualifying factors for this.

   If you kid killed themselves, you should definitely be allowed to access their social media.

   If they got hit by a car, struck by lightning, ate too much sweeties. I don’t know…

5. Why is it always the parents who failed to adequately supervise their kids in life, that end up lecturing everyone else on what’s safe for kids.

6. Another week, another Black Mirror plot becoming true!

7. I can think of a lot of reasons this is a bad idea and none why it’s a good one.

8. > see if they had accessed harmful content online.

   Realistically, they probably have – there’s a lot of it and it’s not hard to find. Hell, sometimes the algorithm just dumps it on you.

9. Very bad idea. If you allow your child access to social media, you should be understand privacy.

10. I don’t understand how they don’t already have this? When my dad died we had his phone and therefore access to his social media. No particular desire to go through it just set his accounts to “memorial page” and the like, we also gave one of his friends access to their texts from him that he didn’t have anymore. Not much drama.

    Surely if you’ve got the device you’ve innately got access? I know phones can be locked but it’s not that hard to unlock them, is it?

11. Will never forget when my grandfather died, and I went through his iPad to reset it and sell it, and his internet tabs was just full of like 200 tabs of pornography

    Now I found that very funny. Can’t imagine parents of a 13 year old boy will enjoy seeing that kind of search history and tabs…

12. Awful, awful idea, in just about every case. Just because a person is a child it doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve their privacy, and that doesnt disappear because they have died. In most cases I don’t see how looking at a person’s social media can change anything unless they caused their own death or they were murdered?

    As someone who lost their mother to suicide I know what it is like to go crazy thinking about the what ifs. If someone had handed me all of her log ins, I would probably still be looking through her accounts now, trying to find something I could pin the blame on, or something to back up my feelings of guilt for not being able to save her. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. My mum would still be dead, she still would have killed herself and I would still miss her more than anything.

    What it would have done however is driven me crazy. It would have led me to focus my energy on something that wasn’t constructive and healing, but damaging and painful.

    However, there could be things in a social media account that give comfort, but I don’t think parents should get free access to everything. I think in the cases of children who have taken their life their social media accounts should be examined as part of the enquiry into their death, and a psychologist should go through them to see if there is anything in them that can explain their suicide. A psychologist should then go through this with the parents and provide on going support.

    Maybe instead they should ensure that parents who loose a child, or people who loose a loved one to things like suicide, are able to access grief counselling on the NHS. I can safely say that loosing someone to suicide is a grief like no other.