Mike Hall’s eyes still fill with tears when he remembers his granddaughter, Ashleigh. Twelve months after her death, David Roberts looks at the impact her murder has had on her family and on the way we look after ourselves on the internet.

SHE was a happy teenage girl, who loved her friends and family and was looking forward to a career as a nursery nurse. When the good-looking young man asked to be her “friend” on Facebook, the 17-year-old quickly accepted his request.

By the admission of her family, Ashleigh Hall did not have much experience with the opposite sex.

But more importantly, like so many of her peers, there was a lack of awareness about the dangers of the internet.

The 19-year-old bare-chested youth was just a photograph masking the identity of a 32-year-old balding sex offender.

The circumstances surrounding Ashleigh’s murder have been retold so many times that now they are so familiar.

But 12 months ago, her death laid bare the inadequacies about what youngsters, their parents and teachers knew about the dangers of the internet.

As a result of this serious lack of understanding, The Northern Echo decided it must act. On the eve of Ashleigh’s funeral, the paper launched its Safety Net campaign.

Its ambitions were clear:

● To make internet safety a compulsory part of the school curriculum;

● To have social networking sites take greater responsibility for their content;

● To raise awareness of the dangers lurking on the internet.

The campaign was set up with the backing of Ashleigh’s family.

In an interview with The Northern Echo at the time, her grandfather, Mike Hall, said the sight of Ashleigh’s friends grieving at her funeral spurred him to act.

“It was going up to the church gates and seeing all of them, all these students, all of them crying, “ he said.

“It’s them we have to get the message across to. They have shared our grief – and we don’t want to have to share anyone else’s grief.

“I don’t want another family to go through what we’ve gone through. We don’t want Ashleigh to have gone in vain.”

The campaign quickly gathered momentum and was backed by Darlington Borough Council and Darlington College. Schools in the town were issued with internet safety packs.

Ashleigh’s friends from Darlington College also produced “Ashleigh’s Rules” – an information card about keeping safe online distributed to every child in Darlington and now being sent out to other local authorities, A conference was organised on internet safety and youngsters in the town worked with professional actors to produce a DVD about online dangers.

Then, in October, two months after Ashleigh’s death, the then minister for schools, Ed Balls, announced that every child over the age of five would be taught internet safety in schools In an article written for The Northern Echo, Mr Balls said: “Ashleigh’s death was tragic.

“No one can guarantee something like this will never happen again, but what we need to do now is do our best to make sure all children and young people are kept safe in future.”

The Government had acted and now it was the turn of the websites themselves.

Initially things looked promising.

As part of the Government’s Click Clever, Click Safe internet safety drive, 140 websites – including many of the main social networking sites – pledged to install a number of safety features, including a Panic Button that would link youngsters directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

These included many of the most popular websites used by youngsters, but not the most popular. Facebook stubbornly refused to install a link to Ceop.

Instead, it preferred to rely on its own security system, which was not a direct link to Ceop.

In March, the court hearing of Peter Chapman once again brought Ashleigh’s case to national attention.

As details emerged about how easily the convicted sex offender was able to groom Ashleigh over Facebook, more pressure was brought to bear on the social networking site, especially when it was revealed in April that Facebook had not passed a single complaint about suspected paedophiles to British police.

Then, in July, Facebook finally capitulated and agreed to install the ClickCeop app on its pages.

The result was a victory for the Safety Net campaign and also a fitting legacy to Ashleigh.

Mike Hall says: “We hoped Ashleigh’s death would not have been in vain, that kids would sit up and take notice, and especially we hoped that parents would be guiding their kids a lot more.

“Everybody seems to be learning and, hopefully, ten minutes about the dangers of the internet each time children receive a lesson is going to get through to them. The internet is not a very nice place at times.”

ON the eve of the anniversary of Ashleigh’s death, the family prefers to concentrate on the fun side of Ashleigh’s life. “Halloween’s coming up, which was Ashleigh’s favourite.” Mike says. “She used to come to my youngest daughter’s house with lasses from college all dressed up to have a party.”

But Mike’s eyes fill up with tears when he thinks of what could have been were it not for the cruel intervention of Chapman.

“I was going past the college yesterday looking at all the students coming out and I pictured Ashleigh coming out.

“She absolutely loved the place, and I think she would have made a real good child carer.

“I think I might have been around still when she got married and had great-grandchildren, but no, we’ve lost all that.”

It is a small comfort to the Hall family that when another girl is asked to befriend a stranger on cyber space instead of clicking yes, she may glance to her copy of Ashleigh’s Rules and think again.

A small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.