Girl, 17, joins lawsuit against government after seeing horrific phone videos at school
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/nov/10/girl-17-joins-lawsuit-against-government-after-seeing-horrific-phone-videos-at-school
Posted by radiant_0wl
Girl, 17, joins lawsuit against government after seeing horrific phone videos at school
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/nov/10/girl-17-joins-lawsuit-against-government-after-seeing-horrific-phone-videos-at-school
Posted by radiant_0wl
23 Comments
Good, I left school in 2021 but there was always that one kid who had fucked up videos on his phone
>My parents were strict at home but at school people can airdrop you videos or show you their screen without invitation, to see your reaction
If it’s an iPhone there’s a setting to disable that feature!
Smart phones are a useful tool, it’s a shame people use them in a way to damage the mental well being of others. The main issue is social media as this sort of content is mostly spread through lack of moderation on the platforms.
This is so horrifying.. Parents are responsible for kids and their phones at home, but School are responsible for this while kids are at School. Parents can monitor their kids smartphone usage perfectly while their child is at home, but at School any kid can just shove any fucked up video in another kids face.
The School is 100% responsible for this. There should be a strict no phones policy to avoid this from happening. There is simply no other way around it.
I remember being shocked when I was round a mates and he showed everyone Two Girls ___ ___.
Honestly, why in this country do we just think the solution to all problems is to ban it. No looking at alternatives, pushing others to take responsibility, no trying to understand underlying issues. Just ban, ban, ban! It’s infuriating.
Yeah, let’s just legislate our way out of this one too shall we?
The girl or her parents could have reported this to the school, the school could have then taken action and looked at safeguarding for ALL children concerned, if they knew and failed to do something they then may have questions to answer.
The girl could have reported this to her parents who could then have taken her phone away or put restrictions which would put the phone out of action during school hours except for phone calls to parents (we had this on my daughters phone)
Where is personal or parental responsibility in all this?
This is a borderline frivolous lawsuit and should be treated as such:
> They point to a range of serious safeguarding incidents that are commonplace throughout the school day **and on the journey to and from school**.
Their complaint and their proposed solution does nothing about what happens outside school hours.
I’m curious who is funding is or whether this is just a spot of ambulance chasing by the lawyers just to collect some fees.
People need to take some personal responsibility, not running around trying to make other people’s lives harder by appealling to authority at the first sign of adversity. A contemptible campaign
So we cannot punish children who are sharing porn or gore videos at school but we can punish a school?
Schools aren’t prisons, you can’t just keep banning things and expecting the kids to comply, they’ll just work around it. The only way to work this is to hold the parents responsible and have them stop their kids taking their phones to school with them, but that kind of defeats the point of the child having a phone to be able to maintain contact with the parents.
We can’t keep putting the burden on schools, even if you ban phones at school and are somehow successful at enforcing it, the kids will just do this outside of school. We need to start making parents actually parent their children again. There’s been a disturbing trend of blaming external factors for children’s poor behaviour and not holding the parents responsible, we need to change that.
Can schools not escalate matters to a legal level? Confiscate the phone and hand it over to the police?
That seems most appropriate to ensure safeguarding for both the offended student and the student causing offence. Also bringing parents into the matter legally and holding them accountable.
My kids high school banned them whilst in school, 15 years ago… The phones were confiscated till end of term. We got them Nokia shit phones.. of course now the phones have everything on them. It can be done!
I am a teacher at a comprehensive high school.
We have the same policy re: phones as the article suggests that school has. Except in our case, it works. If we see a phone, it gets confiscated and the parents have to come to collect it, it never gets given back to the student.
We have a good range of demographic intake here, and by far almost every student complies. Seeing a phone out in class is a rare exception (and it’s really easy to tell if someone is on their phone if you are doing your job right). Same for corridors, as we have a robust supervision rota that is kept to the letter.
I suspect the school isn’t enforcing its policy as well as it would like.
What is the real problem the existence of mobile phones or poor parenting or a bit of both?
Someone should introduce her to personal responsibility
Don’t want to receive unsolicited videos?
Don’t enable the functionality to receive unsolicited videos – which is off by default.
Are kids extremely weak willed nowadays? Gathering around the guy willing to use mobile data to stream a shock video and us all reacting to it in collective revulsion would have been a highlight of the day. Yeah, I’ll vomit if I watch that video where a couple of ladies make creative use of a cup, but my instinct isn’t to blame the school and threaten legal action.
>“My school had a ‘see it, hear it, lose it’ policy, but in reality we just used them under the desk, in the toilets, during lunch break, in the playground, on the bus, even in the corridors. It was impossible for the teachers to stop us.
Ok, so phones are already effectively banned but the kids just don’t give a toss and try their best to access social media crap regardless, how is this the school’s fault?
There was a big thing about ten years ago where women kept receiving dick pics from perverts on the tube so Apple made it impossible to use it as described here without help.
>*^(They point to a range of serious safeguarding incidents that are commonplace throughout the school day and on the journey to and from school)*
How are teachers supposed to police kids *’on their journey to and from school*’???!!!!
I feel the awkwardness of this title is hiding an agenda /s
Surely you should be suing the parents of the kid showing the videos if anyone. What’s the government got to do with this?
hi ios nerd here, airdrop limited being able to receive anything from anyone all the time SINCE IOS 16, you can only accept anything from anyone for up to 10 minutes at a time, then it defaults back to contacts only
How is this the governments fault?
I don’t like sticking up for the government, but this shouldn’t go anywhere.
It’s also hardly a new thing. This just smells like somebody wants a payout and taking a chance.
Airdrop doesn’t even work like that and hasn’t for a good while. Chancer
It’s other parents fault depending ok age. But at her age? It’s only the fault of the person sending the stuff.