A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child’s social media accounts to help understand why they died.
Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died.
Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems.
Roome said this was “entirely wrong”. Her son Jools Sweeney took his own life in 2022, leaving no clues as to what may have led him to suicide. He did not seem depressed and in the hours leading up to his death he appeared to his friends and family to be happy.
“It’s really awful. If a child had died of an illness, you’d do a postmortem and work out what was wrong. It’s not going to bring my son back, and I’m not going to stop grieving, but maybe just to understand what happened in those last few hours,” she said.
“Because an hour and a half before he left our house – and there’s a video of him saying goodbye to his friend – he was fine. So what changed or what was going through his mind? And social media may give me the answers.”
As her petition has gathered more than 100,000 signatures, there is likely to be a debate in parliament on the issue, though this will only happen after the general election and is subject to the discretion of the new petitions committee.
Roome is part of a group of 11 parents who met government and Ofcom representatives with the aim of giving parents an automatic right to their dead child’s data.
The group includes Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly ended her life after viewing harmful content online, and the parents of Archie Battersbee, who died after possibly taking part in a social media “challenge”.
Roome said: “It might be that, I don’t know, he was being stalked by some weirdo, it might be body issues, it might be depression, it might be a ‘challenge’, or it might not give me any answers. I really have to, as a mum, try for the answers.”
Coroners were granted new powers under the Online Safety Act, which came into force on 1 April this year, to get help from Ofcom to access social media and online gaming data when investigating a child’s potential suicide.
However, parents are still not entitled to access this data themselves and the ruling only applies to children who are thought to have taken their own lives, and not those, for example, murdered by someone they may have communicated with online.
Roome added: “In my case particularly, he’s not here any more, so what privacy rules are we protecting him from? It’s like we’re protecting social media giants. I just feel it’s entirely wrong.”
In the UK, the youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org, and in the UK and Ireland Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 988 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
