3404617

SARAH VINE: My eerie exploration of the self-harm sites that resulted in the murder of my dearly loved kid.By SARAH spicymatures pics VINE, COLUMNIST

Published: 19: 52 EST, 17 January 2014| Updated: 19: 52 EST, 17 January 2014

-

--- e-mail

12

Watch opinions

Horror: Tallulah Wilson, 15, committed suicide after posting on Tumblr, where people post pictures and directions on how to hole their forearms.

Three days. That's all it took to create an account on the social networking website Tumblr and consider a recognize telling me how to slit my wrists most successfully, how I can create them practically unattainable for specialists to knot up.

After three minutes, I'm plunged into a magical world of soreness, with images of a younger lady hanging from a rope, another hyperventilating as heart pours down her hip, and a child holding a gun to his own head in a toilet cubicle.

The photos flitter like moments from a scary movie that have only just begun to blink. This universe, scarcely a dozen clicks ahead, is at once terrifying and compelling- a exclusively shocking combination of innocence and corruption.

Helpfully, Tumblr offers me a" You Might Like This Too" panel next to the images, spicymatures pics which will provide recommendations based on the images I'm viewing.

I click on a picture of a heavily bleed arm with the caption" I hate it when the cuts don't turn out so deep." The author of the post appears to be a pretty young girl with big eyes and blue hair.

I follow her on Facebook. One of them frequently posts images of a slim girl wearing underwear that show off her hipbones and" thigh gap," where her legs are so slim that the tops of her thighs don't meet.

Some of the images have been deleted,' marked for review'. Someone must be monitoring this stuff, even if it's obviously not close enough to censor a picture of an entire arm covered in scars, some fresh and others healing.

A terrible image of what appears to be an infected cigarette burn is next to it.

The most disturbing image is that of a lithe young thing who has marked herself up in black pen, like a surgeon's marks on a patient who's about to go under the knife. Her waist, inner thighs, and underarms are detailed in dots, much like the instructions on a paper doll's" cut here" instructions. Her breasts, in contrast, are marked for enlarging.

I'm posing as a 16-year-old on Tumblr, a social networking site populated mostly by children and young adults. American David Karp, 27, bought Yahoo! and set up by It has more than 200 employees and is an online gimmick with over$ 1 billion in revenue last year.

Popular: Tumblr was founded in 2007 and now receives almost 100 million posts a day, most of them innocent

Prodigy: Tumblr's CEO, David Karp, like many internet millionaires, has not yet reached the age of 30.