THE mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey has called for greater regulation on the use of smartphones for under-16s.

Esther Ghey said mobile phones should be made available without social media apps as she urged for searches of inappropriate material by children to be flagged to parents.

Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe were both 15 when they killed Brianna, 16, with a hunting knife after luring her to Linear Park, Culcheth, a village near Warrington, Cheshire, on February 11 last year.

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Jenkinson had watched videos of torture and murder online.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show, Esther said: “We’d like a law introduced so that there are mobile phones that are only suitable for under-16s.

“So if you’re over 16, you can have an adult phone, but then under the age of 16, you can have a children’s phone, which will not have all of the social media apps that are out there now.

“Also to have software that is automatically downloaded on the parents’ phone which links to the children’s phone, that can highlight keywords.

“So if a child is searching the kind of words that Scarlett and Eddie were searching, it will then flag up on the parent’s phone.”

She said that if the searches her daughter’s killers had made had been flagged, their parents may have been “able to get some kind of help”.

Esther said Brianna had accessed pro-anorexia and self-harm material online and been “very protective” over her phone, which had caused arguments.

“If she couldn’t have accessed the sites, she wouldn’t have suffered as much,” she said.

Esther described the internet as the “Wild West” and added that the focus of technology has been on making money rather than “how we protect people or how we can necessarily benefit society”.

Earlier this week, Jenkinson and Ratcliffe, both now 16, were jailed for life and given minimum terms of 22 and 20 years before parole.

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Reacting to the interview on social media, SNP MP Stewart McDonald said: "Esther Ghey really is the embodiment of moral strength.

"She has been put through absolute hell that most of us could never imagine, and yet she shows a compassion, dignity and resilience that escapes so many these days. Our society can learn so much from her."