Family's devastation of girl, 12, who took her own life 'after being groomed on Snapchat'
10 March 2025, 15:00
Semina Halliwell was 12 years old when she took her own life.
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Her mum, Rachel, has told LBC how she had been groomed on Snapchat by an older boy as she prepared to begin secondary school, had been pressured into meeting him, and later reported being raped in the woods close to her home in Southport.
Rachel said: “It turns out an older boy from school had been messaging her online, it had started in the summer before she’d started high school, and it progressed to him asking for naked photographs, him wanting to be her first – she’d never been sexually active before – and her being put under a lot of pressure to meet him.”
In the weeks and months after this had happened, Semina’s mental health went into decline, she began self-harming and eventually took an overdose of her mum’s medication.
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“Semina was bullied online by various people. That led to her being beaten up three times, it was videoed and shared on social media. All these factors, everything taken into consideration, the grooming, the bullying, it starts online. That led, a combination of everything, to her death.”
On the day she took the overdose, Semina had posted online: “I may laugh and smile every day, but I’m in so much pain.”
Rachel told LBC: “It was a toxic drug with no antidote, so she died a very slow death in hospital. She suffered three heart attacks, they thought they would try and save her by amputating her legs, because her brain was very much awake – there was no brain damage.
"She got through that operation, they saved her legs, but after that they realised her fingers were going black so they would have to start amputating her fingers. The next morning, she had her fourth heart attack and that’s when she passed away.”
Following Semina’s death, Rachel was also targeted by online trolls, she said: “I was targeted a lot, even after her death. The social media side of it was just disgusting.
"Even the day of the funeral, people had taken photographs, taken pictures of people in coffins and writing her name across them, putting a picture out there of her in her horse and carriage and writing the most despicable things.
“I’d get abuse online saying she deserved what she got, that Semina was a slag, a whore, that I was a bad mother – just endless. It’s really difficult, because at the time your world is broken, you actually think people would never be that cruel to put that kind of abuse online.
“It’s so hurtful, it’s heartbreaking, and your first reaction is to hit back. It took me a long time to learn that there are a lot of evil people at the end of a phone or a laptop who deliberately get off on causing hurt and pain.
"I’m an adult and it’s taken me three years to learn not to react to it, so imagine if you’re a child how that would affect you mentally."
“I’m not sure if (the Online Safety Act) really will make a difference? People will always find a way regardless. What exactly is going to change? Unless they put something in, really hard measures so you have to prove you have some form of ID, passport, driving license, you have to prove who you are, it’s going to go on and it’s never going to stop.”
