The shocking things kids do for likes

Our youngsters’ obsession with online fame and going viral has taken a very sinister turn

- FRANCES LEATE

It sounds too awful to be true, but the shocking new craze sweeping social-media platform TikTok involves teenagers pretending to be victims of terrible crimes, including 9/11 and the Holocaust.

In the disturbing new trend dubbed ‘trauma porn’, thousands of fame-hungry users are making videos of themselves covered in fake cuts and bruises, sometimes dressed in striped clothing like that worn by Auschwitz prisoners or torn outfits to depict a rape victim. They then describe how they ‘died’, sometimes in explicit, gory detail.

‘His hands were around my neck,’ says one woman, pretending to be the bloodied victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. ‘All I could hear were the screams,’ says another, mimicking a 9/11 victim.

The videos have attracted hundreds of thousands of likes, spurring perpetrators to be more shocking – whether it’s acting out the life of an abused child or a grieving relative who lost a loved one in a car accident. Women Own investigates the damage youngsters are doing, not only to the families of those victims they imitate but to themselves.

‘They should be careful what they wish for’

Karen Edwards, 59, lives in Swindon.

From the moment my daughter, Becky GoddenEdwards, went missing in 2002, aged just 20, my life and the lives of the rest of my family have been in complete turmoil. The pain of having a missing loved one and not knowing what’s happened to them is a daily agony that never goes away.

Then, in 2011, when local taxi driver Christopher Halliwell confessed to police that he’d brutally murdered Becky and buried her body in a field, that pure agony and grief only intensified.