The latest Twitter trend shocking the world is #Cut4Bieber.  Supposedly started off as a prank, the idea was to get ‘Beliebers’ (die hard Justin Bieber fangirls) to cut themselves after an unproved rumour that the singer was caught smoking a joint.  As news of the trend spread, non-Beliebers far and wide started to mock them. “If you’re #cutting4bieber why don’t you just cut a little deeper?” one girl on my Twitter wrote.

Self harm is not a joke. Suicide is not a joke.

Now this may be the unpopular thing to do, but I’m away to jump to the defense of the Beliebers.  Most of the people involved are young and very impressionable.  I’ve looked at some of the photos, and a lot of those girls (it’s about 98% girls) already had scars.  So what if they weren’t cutting to get their message through to Justin, but cutting because somebody had decided that self harm was going to make the world a better place.  For a lot of sufferers, the sight of these cuts flooding onto twitter, the sight of the blood dripping down their arms, was enough to trigger regardless of whether they were a Belieber or not.

Instead of mocking, people should have been helping these people because that’s what they needed.  They’re clearly not only impressionable, but also incredibly mentally fragile and that’s a very dark line to walk alone.  They needed support, and the only support they could get was from self harmers and other Beliebers dedicated to the cause, when they needed people to hold their hand and explain to them that #cut4bieber wasn’t going to stop their idol from drugs as long as they were still buying his music.   Now they’re going to be left with the scars to remind them of a society that wouldn’t help them, when in fact it’s society that deserves to be left with those permanant marks to remind them of the time that they refused to help their peers in a time of need.

As far as I’m concerned, the Beliebers are not at fault here.  The people who started the trend are, and the people mocking them are just as bad.