Brianna Ghey: should killers have been named?

The identities of the teenage killers of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey have been revealed by a judge as they face life sentences. 

Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were known as Girl X and Boy Y during their trial for the killing of the transgender schoolgirl, who was stabbed 28 times with a hunting knife after being lured by the pair to a park in Cheshire last February.

Lifting the anonymity order, Justice Amanda Yip, who described Ghey's killing as a "particularly brutal murder", said: "There is a strong public interest in the full and unrestricted reporting of what is plainly an exceptional case."

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For a court to lift restrictions on naming juveniles is "unusual", said Sky News. Judges have to weigh up the "potential for harm to the child against the principle of open justice and letting the public know as much as possible about what happened".

'Telling half a story'

Lawyers for Jenkinson and Ratcliffe had argued against lifting the naming restrictions because of the risks to the duo's welfare and the impact on their families.

But Justice Yip said that it was "inevitable their names would become known" after they both turn 18 next year, at which point the order banning their identification will automatically expire.

She added: "The public will naturally wish to know the identities of the young people responsible as they seek to understand how children could do something so dreadful. Continuing restrictions inhibits full and informed debate and restricts the full reporting of the case."

Denise Fergus, the mother of murdered toddler James Bulger, who was killed by schoolboys Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in 1993, said knowing who killed her son helped her cope with the tragedy.

"I do think they should be identified," she told ITV News. "What is the point in telling half a story? You want to know what these people look like that took this child's life away. I don't think I would've been able to carry on the way I have not knowing what they looked like."

Richard Henriques, who led the prosecution of the young killers of Bulger, told the BBC that he agreed with Yip's decision, arguing that "the public interest here requires or allows parents, grandparents, godparents, aunts and uncles to say to themselves, 'could this happen in our family?'" 

'No good has ever come from naming'

Ghey's father, Peter Spooner, said he had initially wanted his daughter's killers to be named but had changed his opinion.

"Now, I think their names are always going to be tied to Brianna's all the time," he told Sky News. "I think they should just be forgotten about, locked up and not be spoken about again. They're nothing."

"No good has ever come from publicly naming a child convicted for killing," argued Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. "How could it? How could giving an already disturbed child lifelong and inescapable notoriety in any way contribute to their – possible, hoped-for – re-entry into society as functioning adults?"

"The naming of them and the shaming of them is a barrier to rehabilitation," agreed Andrea Coomber KC, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform charity. "It creates troubles for their safety in prison and upon release because these are children at the end of the day. They need to be given the space to grow and to move beyond their crime."

It does not detract from the gravity of these crimes "to argue that children should be treated differently to adults", agreed Luke Gittos on Spiked in 2022, writing about a different case involving a child murderer. "Children are less morally culpable for their actions" and "we should always treat them differently when we come to judge them for evil behaviour".