Damned auto complete. Opinion.
If kids at the age of 12 don’t understand that stabbing your friend 19 times is wrong and that killing someone is permanent, then one of two things should happen, 1) their parents should be held accountable as they have failed to produce caring sympathetic human beings, or 2) these children are insane and should be under 24 hour psychological care.
You can’t excuse this type of behavior as “Oh, they’re just being kids.”
Pretty good thing that no one is saying that, then.
Thanks for clearing up that very important point.
Salon has an interesting (to me, anyway) take on this.
My takeaway key points -
[ul]
[li]For the author, there is this phenomena of young girls becoming BFF’s with an underpinning of fantastical story telling.[/li][li]Through a sort of peer pressure feedback loop, the behavior of the pair can go off the rails.[/li][/ul]
Also of interest, a reference to the story behind the film Heavenly Creatures:
My takeaway from that is - in the Parker-Hulme case one of the girls kinda “grew out of it”.
So, circling back to the OP, I’m willing to say that we don’t try these 12 year-old girls as adults, nor sentence them to life in prison. With some treatment, they’ll likely grow out of their current state of ignorance and obsession.
Are you sure about that?
Ah, another vote for “let kids be kids”. I don’t think stabbing your friend 19 times at the age of 12 comes from a state of ignorance.
First time I’ve heard psychopathic behavior compared to immaturity.
Its hard to deny children the benefits of adult privilege and then turn around and judge them as adults when there is hard scientific fact that child brains are so different from adults brains. My compromise solution would be to lock them in juvie until they’re 18, and then at 18, re-evaluate their mental condition to ascertain risk of relapse. I would not simply let them go at 18 as our current laws hold, but take into account the seriousness in which something like this is out of the ordinary, and not treat them as typical kids either.
Something like this should mean that they are in the system for a long long time. Juvie first, then a prolonged adult monitoring program
I think in this case, you need to examine what their thinking was regarding this “Slender Man” legend. From the linked article, it sounds like they expected to get some sort of power as his “proxies” by killing the victim, and if that’s all it is, then they need to be prosecuted like adults - making a rational, but evil, decision that personal gain of some sort is worth someone else’s life. If, however, there was some negative component to their belief (i.e., if they don’t become the Slender Man’s proxies, they would become his prey), then i’d imagine this is a more childish fright that drove them rather than cold, calculating, adult rationality.
It’s clear that they thought the Slender Man was real. I’d say that the important question here is, were they afraid that harm would befall them if they didn’t do this?
And that is something children are prone to do. They had no idea that Slender Man was made up just a few years ago. They worked him into their realities as they would any other new data as they tried to make sense of the world. To us twelve seems a little late for that, but it’s very much like adults getting religion or becoming political. Or taking a science class.
While the other sublimated her obsession with murder by killing people in print rather than real life. :eek:
Um, WHAT?
It’s a guy thing? And are you saying that you, as a girl, never tried to work out the details of the Perfect Crime? What DID your brain do with its downtime?
Hey… in my day kids didn’t spend all that time watching Wile E. Coyote without taking a few notes along the way, m’kay?
But the European experience shows that punitive measures are not necessary. If that is the case, then punishment that is not rehabilitative and educative is mere cruelty. If Norway can do it, anyone can!
It is not a case of excusing, but trying to respond rationally and humanely.
Excuse is a weasel word. What I am saying is certain non-punitive methods of dealing with childhood offending may have a much better outcome for society in general than punitive response. i need only point out that the US has a quarter of the world’s prisoners because of its punitive approach to criminal justice, yet i by no means the safest society when threats from criminality are looked at.
Punitive response is too often giving-in to emotional and irrational appeals from people who feel threatened and this can lead to unintended consequences.
Think about what you are saying. The process of socialisation is to move newborns (who are pure psychopaths) toward acceptable behaviour patterns- to learn how not to be a psychopath!
All the evidence shows that punitive detention is useless with children (it is pretty useless with adults save for incapacitation.)If social rather then punitive methods leads to better outcomes, surely we should take that path. No-one is saying ‘do nothing’- what is being suggested is mental health support, re-education with minimum element of negative punishment.
I’d say locking them up for 60 years would be an appropriate punishment. When I was 12 I knew that it was wrong to kill people so I don’t buy this “they’re too young to be responsible” line.
I am totally writing this into a song lyric.
So? Isn’t that just part of being an adult and an artist? “The Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect”, natch. I mean, part of successfully creating and living in a society involves people sublimating impulses and desires, doesn’t it?
Yep.
Ok, well since that’s the way you want it, I guess if you had killed anyone when you were 12, I’d agree that you could be locked up for 60 years. :rolleyes:
Thing is – and I’m not saying that this is the case here – in some cases, psychopaths are born, not made.