25/05/2026
The public anger surrounding the youth sentencing case at Southampton Crown Court this week is completely understandable.
The details are horrifying. As someone who has worked in the justice system for over 30 years, I know the judge involved to be a very fair, highly capable, and good judge.
The law can only react to the damage after it is already done. The real failure happened years before this case reached the courtroom.
What we are seeing is a generation already deformed by a digital environment we refused to regulate. We have allowed smartphones and algorithmic social media to become a lawless wilderness where children are desensitised, detached from empathy, and exposed to things that distort their development entirely.
People used to look at social media as a distant problem, or something that only impacted "other people's kids." But the tide is turning. The panic is setting in because parents are realising that this toxic ecosystem is now likely to start hitting their own children, either as victims of digital weaponisation or as kids losing their humanity to a screen.
No wonder there is a growing, desperate call to ban social media for children entirely.
A courtroom cannot fix what society broke. Until we stop acting surprised by the inevitable consequences of how we fail to educate and protect some young people, and until we hold tech platforms accountable for the damage they are causing, individual families will continue to inherit the wreckage.
