A mum has issued an urgent warning after she noticed children in a playground taking part in the “tap out” TikTok challenge.
Katy Spence from Lincolnshire in the UK spoke out in order to warn other parents of the “harmful” game.
The horrific trend is doing the rounds on TikTok and sees young people being choked until they feel they’re going to lose consciousness at which point they are supposed to tap the other player to stop.
When it began circulating online, there was a lot of safety concerns among mums which led Katy to share how she saw a group of eight children taking part in the challenge.
She revealed to LincolnshireLive that the kids had “no regard for the danger they were putting themselves in”.
She added: “I had taken my nine-year-old son, six-year-old niece and three-year-old nephew to the skate park.
“I was sat on a blanket reading a book when I heard a group of kids, around 11 years old say that they were going to play the ‘tap out’ game
“There was a group of around eight of them and they were being loud and quite intimidating.”
Admitting she would never normally say something about someone else’s child, she felt there was no other choice but to step in.
Explaining to the children why they should not be doing this, Katy said they didn’t seem to care and had “no regard for the danger they were putting themselves in, when I told them that they could end up in a wheelchair they just didn’t care.”
In 2016, a 12-year-old boy from Birmingham died after he took part in the trend. Karnel Haughton was discovered unconscious by his mum and sadly did not make it.
