Brianna Ghey and dark net ‘red rooms’

What parents need to know about the digital underworld

Earlier this week two 16-year olds were found guilty of the ‘senseless’ murder of Brianna Ghey – a teenage transgender girl who was stabbed 28 times in broad daylight in a park in Warrington.  

Everything about the case is shocking. Including the fact that one of the killers – ‘Girl X’ – watched torture videos on the dark net. It’s rumoured she accessed so-called ‘red rooms’, which are live streams of people being tortured or murdered.  

For my book The Dark Net – and subsequent research – I have spent a lot of time on the dark net. I have never seen a functioning ‘red room’. Nor have I seen links to functioning red rooms, or any other type of murder or torture videos. Red room sites definitely do exist in the dark net - but according to specialist Eileen Ormsby there is no evidence any of them actually work. In fact they are most likely scams, designed to lure people into spending bitcoin for live streams that doesn’t exist (the buyers obviously won’t go to Action Fraud to complain). It’s obviously hard to study this stuff safely, but some researchers think they are an urban myth. The closest documented case is probably Australian Peter Scully. In 2018 he was found guilty of human trafficking and rape, and is alleged to have run dark net red-rooms which offered live-streaming of torture and sexual abuse of children. 

One thing I can confidently say is that ‘Girl X' would have spent a lot of time searching for this material. It wouldn’t have appeared in front of her, or via an accidental link-click. The dark net doesn’t work like that - you need to know where you’re going. 

Shortly after the verdict, a senior officer at Cheshire Police advised other parents to use this tragedy as an opportunity to ‘sharpen up’. Meaning: make sure you know about what your children might see online “when they are sat with the door shut in their bedrooms.” Although vague, he’s right. I imagine a lot of parents are pretty worried about their children being exposed to something similar. So here are five things you need to know.   

First, it is not hard to find the dark net. Hidden encrypted websites sound like they exist far below the world of Google and Facebook. But cyberspace doesn’t have depth. If you know where to look, everything is as accessible as everything else. It’s just a click away, and most teenagers could work it out in under ten minutes.

The majority of people get to the dark net using a Tor browser, which is a bit like a powerful open source VPN, which allows you to browse without giving away your IP address. Here’s the landing page when you use the Tor browser, so you’ll recognise it if you see it.

Dark net websites URLs are meaningless character strings which end in .onion. They look like this:

https://www.bbcweb3hytmzhn5d532owbu6oqadra5z3ar726vq5kgwwn6aucdccrad.onion/ukrainian

Try visiting that link with Chrome; you’ll get a ‘this site can’t be reached’ message. Try again, using Tor. (Don’t worry - this is the BBC’s dark net Ukrainian language news site.)

Second, the dark net is vanishingly small. It is often confused with the much larger ‘deep web’ but the two are quite different. The deep web refers to the internet that is not openly accessible using a normal web-browser: everything behind passwords or paywalls, internal documents, government databases. That makes up a large fraction of the internet, and it’s nearly all harmless. The dark net (or dark web - it means the same thing) is a subset of the deep web. It’s no more than a few thousand sites.   

Third, the most common uses of the dark net is definitely not viewing murder and torture videos. These are extremely unusual and very hard to find. I’m fairly confident its most widespread use is buying and selling illicit goods on one of the many dark net marketplaces. The most infamous of these was The Silk Road, which was shut down by the FBI a decade ago.

The Guardian (2013)

These sites come and go – until last year a Russian marketplace called Hydra was the largest – but the competitive, user friendly, easy access markets are still with us. Drugs are popular, but so are stolen credit card details, username and password credentials, fake identity documents.  

For lots of reasons, these sites will never entirely vanish. Chainalysis has a decent summary of the current state of the dark net markets – which turned over roughly $1.5bn in 2022.  

Alongside that, there remains a significant amount of child sexual abuse material. In 2020 the Internet Watch Foundation identified 734 new net dark sites dedicated to illegal images. This material has proven almost impossible to remove because the way the technology works – websites are hosted on servers dotted all over the world, whose location is hidden. Each time a site is removed, another one springs up.

Fourth, the dark net is often a little misunderstood. The same privacy enhancing and censorship resistant design that protects the bad stuff also helps the good guys. The Tor browser has won a lot of awards for helping journalists stay safe and encouraging greater privacy. I use it for my work all the time. There are several whistleblower sites on the dark net, and even the BBC has a presence there, designed for people worried about government monitoring.

Finally, although the dark net generates headlines, there is just as much bad stuff on the normal internet. Drugs and stolen data are easy enough to get through Telegram and other popular messaging apps; self-harm and self-hate content circulates widely on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest; videos of people dying can be viewed on Twitter with a simple search.  

Dark net misbehaviour is still rare - red rooms rarer still. If I were worried about my kids getting up to no good online, the dark net wouldn’t be my main concern. It would be algorithms pushing self hate on a friendly looking social media platform.  

Nevertheless, it’s obvious that people – including young people – will be drawn to the dark net.  Spending years there hasn’t made me want to self-harm, watch murder videos, or bully someone anonymously. But I have become accustomed and habituated to horrible and troubling things. I’ve seen how quickly and easily people can get sucked into very dark and destructive places. If I had a propensity towards any of these behaviours, perhaps it would have encouraged me. It certainly plausible that ‘Girl X’ became highly de-sensitised to murder and torture if she saw a lot of it online.

In the end, parents have a duty to understand these kinds of subcultures – both on the dark net and the normal net. If you see your kids on the dark net or using Tor, it doesn’t mean they have done anything wrong. Have an open and honest chat about it.  

To do that, you need to understand what it is and how it works. I’m not suggesting you start digging around dodgy forums, but at the very least read up and get knowledgeable. Internet Matters has a useful guide on talking to kids about the dark net, which is free here. You can download Tor here and it’s perfectly legal. I advise you at least try it, so you know what it is. In the end, every parent needs to understand the risky worlds their children might inhabit. That’s harder than it used to be. But it’s still worth trying.