"Are books to blame for children losing themselves in fantasy worlds of violence and rape? We here at CNN have mountains of evidence that they aren't but one paranoid and opinionated mother disagrees. We'll give them equal time to debate when we come back from the break."
I know I was just playing video games, reading and goofing off - but I was 12 over 25 years ago. It was completely different. We weren't surrounded by the same level of media. I'm not making excuses, but imagine being with your friend and saying "is this slenderman thing real?" and then spending hours digging into the web - being convinced in video, image, forum posts, and article format that he is. It doesn't take much to imagine a few impressionable kids being completely convinced of something we see as completely ridiculous.
0
HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
Obviously it depends on the person, but my memory of being twelve is not that I was floating through a blurred fantasy land composed of a mashup of the real world and whatever fantasy novel I'd read that week.
Sure, twelve-year-olds are stupid. Teenagers are stupid. Twenty-year olds are stupid. Etc. It's really easy to pass off any age below like 18 as being a barely cogent blob of meat that has no idea what's going on, but kids are smarter than we think.
Heck in this case they waffled back and forth about who would do the stabbing mid-execution because they knew how wrong it was. They had a crazy end goal, but in the moment they knew that the act of stabbing someone, whatever the motivation, is a really bad thing to do.
I'm not saying they should be tried as adults (seems to carry more baggage than would be productive), but I also don't think that trying someone as a minor should necessarily entail the assumption that they were one mental step above the faculties of a dog. There's a spectrum of how much kids understand as they grow older, and being twelve is pretty lucid.
The word used was specifically 'premeditation'. That was the concept I was discussing.
There is a huge leap in thought process and planning necessary for premeditated murder as compared to murder/man slaughter/whatever that a 12 year old is pretty much not capable of doing. That doesn't mean they're a semi-sentient pile of goo with no higher brain functions, but they're also not really going to pull some Hannibal Lector or Lex Luthor shit out of thin air.
Obviously it depends on the person, but my memory of being twelve is not that I was floating through a blurred fantasy land composed of a mashup of the real world and whatever fantasy novel I'd read that week.
Sure, twelve-year-olds are stupid. Teenagers are stupid. Twenty-year olds are stupid. Etc. It's really easy to pass off any age below like 18 as being a barely cogent blob of meat that has no idea what's going on, but kids are smarter than we think.
Heck in this case they waffled back and forth about who would do the stabbing mid-execution because they knew how wrong it was. They had a crazy end goal, but in the moment they knew that the act of stabbing someone, whatever the motivation, is a really bad thing to do.
I'm not saying they should be tried as adults (seems to carry more baggage than would be productive), but I also don't think that trying someone as a minor should necessarily entail the assumption that they were one mental step above the faculties of a dog. There's a spectrum of how much kids understand as they grow older, and being twelve is pretty lucid.
The word used was specifically 'premeditation'. That was the concept I was discussing.
There is a huge leap in thought process and planning necessary for premeditated murder as compared to murder/man slaughter/whatever that a 12 year old is pretty much not capable of doing. That doesn't mean they're a semi-sentient pile of goo with no higher brain functions, but they're also not really going to pull some Hannibal Lector or Lex Luthor shit out of thin air.
Premeditated murder is the crime of wrongfully and intentionally causing the death of another human being (also known as murder) after rationally considering the timing or method of doing so, in order to either increase the likelihood of success, or to evade detection or apprehension.[1]
Wrongfully and intentionally attempting to cause death? Yes.
Rationally considering timing? Yes.
Method? Yes.
To increase likelihood of success/avoid detection? Yes.
To evade or split guilt during the act? Yes.
Premeditation totally applies here. A 12 year old can plan out and execute a rational plan in a video game, a sports team, a term paper, or to save their family during a high speed collision, but when it comes to murder somehow they get a free pass? This doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
+3
KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
What word would you use to describe all the planning and contingencies they did do, then? They thought about it beforehand, made plans, plotted how to get her alone, carried out their plans. All while knowing that it was wrong. Them being 12 years old, I'd say that a 12 year old is literally capable of doing it.
When I was 12 I was pretty sure that if I properly applied myself I could command the force.
36 and still trying over here.
One day, goddammit.
On topic:
A series of full psychological evaluations and CT scans wouldn't do any harm for the two offenders; on some occasions, traumatic brain injury can simulate psychosis or sociopathy, sometimes even exacerbate previous physical or psychological trauma.
If there were patterns of physical or sexual abuse that arose in the investigation, and then we found out that one of the girls had a nasty head injury one time at softball practice which evidence shows to be an untreated concussion (or worse), then we start to get an idea of how the pieces are coming together. With the one girl saying that she felt no remorse, I'd hazard a guess that the conditions were ripe for some level of mental and/or psychological trauma to distort her view of fantasy and reality. Mental illness has both physical and environmental causes and they can be intertwined so that one type of damage reinforces the other, so on and so forth, like banging two tuning forks together.
And I think that might be a definite possibility here, but instead split into two different people: one girl with physical trauma and the other with psychological trauma, each of them feeding each other's mental instability in a fucked-up harmonic resonance.
0
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Obviously it depends on the person, but my memory of being twelve is not that I was floating through a blurred fantasy land composed of a mashup of the real world and whatever fantasy novel I'd read that week.
Sure, twelve-year-olds are stupid. Teenagers are stupid. Twenty-year olds are stupid. Etc. It's really easy to pass off any age below like 18 as being a barely cogent blob of meat that has no idea what's going on, but kids are smarter than we think.
Heck in this case they waffled back and forth about who would do the stabbing mid-execution because they knew how wrong it was. They had a crazy end goal, but in the moment they knew that the act of stabbing someone, whatever the motivation, is a really bad thing to do.
I'm not saying they should be tried as adults (seems to carry more baggage than would be productive), but I also don't think that trying someone as a minor should necessarily entail the assumption that they were one mental step above the faculties of a dog. There's a spectrum of how much kids understand as they grow older, and being twelve is pretty lucid.
The word used was specifically 'premeditation'. That was the concept I was discussing.
There is a huge leap in thought process and planning necessary for premeditated murder as compared to murder/man slaughter/whatever that a 12 year old is pretty much not capable of doing. That doesn't mean they're a semi-sentient pile of goo with no higher brain functions, but they're also not really going to pull some Hannibal Lector or Lex Luthor shit out of thin air.
Premeditated murder is the crime of wrongfully and intentionally causing the death of another human being (also known as murder) after rationally considering the timing or method of doing so, in order to either increase the likelihood of success, or to evade detection or apprehension.[1]
Wrongfully and intentionally attempting to cause death? Yes.
Rationally considering timing? Yes.
Method? Yes.
To increase likelihood of success/avoid detection? Yes.
To evade or split guilt during the act? Yes.
Premeditation totally applies here. A 12 year old can plan out and execute a rational plan in a video game, a sports team, a term paper, or to save their family during a high speed collision, but when it comes to murder somehow they get a free pass? This doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Their escape plan was walking into the woods to find a fictional fucking mansion.
9-12 is a weird age in general for world truths too, even before the internet, don't forget, a few years earlier, Santa and the Easter Bunny existed totally! Not to absolve their guilt or anything, but we do kind of fuck up kids brains at that age ( and a bit before, and the reveal of those lies) in regards to what actual reality contains.
I was trying to remember what I was up to when I was 12, and oh man
When I was 12, I regularly stole things from stores. I was a huge klepto. I don't steal from stores anymore, but I do take the occasional office supply home.
But back then, it was so easy. I would regularly take bags full of goodies from a store with a friend of mine.
Glad I never got caught. I guess I grew out of it?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Something Awful sums this whole thing up quite nicely
On Monday, June 2nd, two 12 year old girls from suburban Wisconsin attempted to brutally murder another girl to appease the fictional character Slenderman. This incident has been described as "tragic" and the perpetrators described as "insane" or "deeply troubled." I don't want to make light of mental health issues, but it would seem to me that a more accurate diagnosis would be that these two 12 year old girls are dumb as hell.
They're still around? That's sweet. Good for them.
+7
VivixenneRemember your training, and we'll get through this just fine.Registered Userregular
edited June 2014
So, applying a label of "mentally ill" to a 12-year-old without a good understanding of what a 12-year-old brain is like is a bit, well, silly, actually.
Stuff that develops in an average 11-year-old brain:
1. Understanding flexibility of rules and reality - starting to question what they've been taught thus far.
2. Views of peers begin to do battle with those of parents.
3. Explore other "ways of being" alternate to their own experience.
Anecdotal evidence of what you were like at 12 years old aside, here are some things to consider about what happens in an average 12-year-old brain:
1. Thinking is only just starting to shift from concrete to abstract.
2. Starting to apply concepts learned in earlier developmental stages to abstract and hypothetical situations.
3. Increasing impact of peer pressure and desires to confirm with identified peers.
4. Prefrontal cortex not yet developed enough to properly manage functions like executive decision-making or risk assessment.
In girls, the prefrontal cortex develops more rapidly, usually already establishing skills like long-term planning and impulse control by the early teen years.
Okay so what that stuff basically boils down to is that your average 12 year-old is going to be looking at ways to challenge the rules and realities they know. They will do so as guided by their peers rather than their parents, and will start to hypothesize. They will latch on to abstract possibilities rather than sensory intake.
Stealing at that age is common for a reason. You know it's wrong because your parents have told you so, but what would happen, really, if you stole that candy? Would you get in trouble? Would someone get hurt? It'd make you happy though, because candy! What if you didn't get caught? Maybe we should find out! And it's exceedingly common for a kid to stare at a piece of candy, flipping yes/no/yes/no over in their heads multiple times, before either impulsively grabbing it (and damn the consequences!), just as impulsively refusing to grab it, or, more likely, getting distracted and forgetting about the dilemma all together.
Now, factor in neuroplasticity and the fact that your brain pathways can change and shift to accommodate new information over the lifespan. This means that pretty much any experience can be considered "normal" if you are exposed to it often enough and long enough, and have little evidence to the contrary. Some forms of this are a result of trauma - e.g., where you get so used to the presence of danger that your limbic system doesn't react anymore when you danger approaches. That's desensitization.
If these girls had been exposed to Slenderman stuff long enough and often enough that it is normalising, it makes sense that they have also been desensitized to a certain form of content. At their age, their thinking is becoming more sophisticated, which means they will start contemplating that content. Maybe they question it, wonder if it's real or not, or are challenged by their peers. They may experiment to see if it can be proven, or find other ways to deepen their understanding of the content. So they planned, hesitated, planned some more, waffled, and eventually weak impulse control (due to an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex) led to them actually acting.
You could even argue based on the above that if their parents had told them Slenderman is not real, it wouldn't have been enough, because they're at that developmental stage where they will challenge that.
Independent of your own anecdotal experiences of being 12, it is not outside the realm of possibility that these girls acted in precisely the way a 12 year old could be expected to act if the above is true. Though, if you wanted, you could argue that Slenderman becoming the norm at all for anyone is a sign of mental illness or a developmental delay.
So, were these girls mentally ill? We don't know, because we are not the people tasked with finding out. They could be, to lack the ability to identify death as permanent or the non-existence of a fictional figure or to demonstrate cruelty to another girl! Or they could be behaving exactly as you'd expect given their age and what their norms have been growing up. But those are also developmental questions every bit as much as they are mental health ones, because you're talking about still-growing brains. In a case like this, you cannot talk about mental health only to ignore developmental issues, or vice versa!
What they did was astonishingly disturbing and unique, and warrants much investigation. This obsession people have for Occam's Razor where it may not actually belong is just silly. The explanation is what it is, not the simplest version of all possible explanations.
Anything and everything I know about human cognitive development tells me that these kids don't need prison (which is what that fucking Prosecuter is surely salivating about, and maybe the judge too). Not for the sake of the victim, not for the sake of society and definitely not for their own sake.
Even in my layman mind exposing young, not fully developed and impressionable, brains to the worst of society instead of structured treatment is a surefire way to say "They're bad. Lets not try to fix anything and instead tell their parents to consider them a loss and try for a new one".
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Tough on crime approach works. Surely the US incarceration rate, being twice as high as the rest of the civilized world (topping Cuba, some of the most negative expectations for incarceration rates in china and being probably equal to the estimated incarceration rates of North Korea), has nothing at all to do with their approach to (or rather lack of) prisoner rehabilitation.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
0
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Just a reminder that last year, at the junior high I worked at, a couple of 13 year-old girls got in trouble for trying to have boys sign their breasts instead of their yearbooks on the 2nd to last day of the school year.
Somehow I feel the media may have played a role in this.
I keep feeling that comparing ourselves at 12 to these girls is...off.
Maybe you did stupid things that ended up getting you hurt.
Maybe you believed stupid things.
Maybe you stole things.
Maybe you got in fights at school.
I'm not sure any of us planned out and executed attempted murder in the name of an internet meme at that age.
0
KalTorakOne way or another, they all end up inthe Undercity.Registered Userregular
I keep feeling that comparing ourselves at 12 to these girls is...off.
Maybe you did stupid things that ended up getting you hurt.
Maybe you believed stupid things.
Maybe you stole things.
Maybe you got in fights at school.
I'm not sure any of us planned out and executed attempted murder in the name of an internet meme at that age.
I think the point is that at that age your brain is still developing, so it's a bit more complicated than just 'oh yeah they're super crazy/dumb' and call it a day.
Just because the expression of those changes is more extreme than we're used to or might expect (much more so in this case) doesn't necessarily mean they're fundamentally different from the rest of us. We have no idea what their home life was like or what other issues they might have been going through, so we can't just write them off.
+1
Ubikoh pete, that's later. maybe we'll be dead by thenRegistered Userregular
edited June 2014
there's a lot of focus on their reasons for attempting to kill a girl but whether the murder is to appease some myth or hasten an inheritance or extract vengeance, i think the more appropriate inquiry is their understanding of murder and their understanding of the wrongness of their actions
A Las Vegas couple who gunned down two police officers and a civilian before killing themselves apparently looked at law enforcement as oppressors, a sheriff's department official said Monday.
Among the clues: a "Don't Tread on Me" flag and a Nazi swastika the couple placed on one of the police officers they ambushed Sunday at a pizza restaurant. They also pinned onto the officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution," Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters.
"We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ... with Nazis," McMahill said. "In other words, they believe law enforcement is the oppressor."
...
A woman who says she lived near the couple told CNN affiliate KTNV that the married couple liked to dress up as the villainous Batman characters Joker and Harley Quinn.
The neighbor, Krista Koch, told the station the man also sometimes dressed as Slenderman, a fictional horror character that recently surfaced in the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin.
I wonder if that is actually true, or if its a case of the neighbor seeing Slenderman stuff on the news and just making it up to be sure to get in print.
I wonder what the Marfan Foundation has to say about all this
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
0
Lord Palingtonhe.him.hisHistory-loving pal!Registered Userregular
Slenderman cosplay is pretty common at cons, so if that couple did any cosplaying at all, a slenderman costume isn't out of the question.
I thought about this the other day and it occurred to me the rep that the 12 year old stabbing victim is going to have
"Dude, did you... you didn't piss off Cindy, did you? They got her 19 times and she didn't die! You're fucked, man"
A Las Vegas couple who gunned down two police officers and a civilian before killing themselves apparently looked at law enforcement as oppressors, a sheriff's department official said Monday.
Among the clues: a "Don't Tread on Me" flag and a Nazi swastika the couple placed on one of the police officers they ambushed Sunday at a pizza restaurant. They also pinned onto the officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution," Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters.
"We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ... with Nazis," McMahill said. "In other words, they believe law enforcement is the oppressor."
...
A woman who says she lived near the couple told CNN affiliate KTNV that the married couple liked to dress up as the villainous Batman characters Joker and Harley Quinn.
The neighbor, Krista Koch, told the station the man also sometimes dressed as Slenderman, a fictional horror character that recently surfaced in the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin.
They were racist, sovereign citizen-believing geese who went to hang out with Cliven Bundy for a while, I don't think what else they were into really factors into this.
A Las Vegas couple who gunned down two police officers and a civilian before killing themselves apparently looked at law enforcement as oppressors, a sheriff's department official said Monday.
Among the clues: a "Don't Tread on Me" flag and a Nazi swastika the couple placed on one of the police officers they ambushed Sunday at a pizza restaurant. They also pinned onto the officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution," Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters.
"We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ... with Nazis," McMahill said. "In other words, they believe law enforcement is the oppressor."
...
A woman who says she lived near the couple told CNN affiliate KTNV that the married couple liked to dress up as the villainous Batman characters Joker and Harley Quinn.
The neighbor, Krista Koch, told the station the man also sometimes dressed as Slenderman, a fictional horror character that recently surfaced in the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin.
They were racist, sovereign citizen-believing geese who went to hang out with Cliven Bundy for a while, I don't think what else they were into really factors into this.
I'm sure we'll hear all about the heavy metal music they listened to next.
Battletag BYToady#1454
0
ceresWhen the last moon is cast over the last star of morningAnd the future has past without even a last desperate warningRegistered User, ModeratorMod Emeritus
See, here is the thing about that shooting that makes literally anything people have to say about fictional characters feel completely beside the point as far as I'm concerned:
These people went to join a very real sit-in at a ranch FULL of people who are waving guns and yelling about a revolution and being above the law, and they did it not 45 minutes from where I live, after which they wandered into the city I live in and shot some people.
I do not care what they wore or what they listened to or what they ate for dinner, I only care that there is a group of heavily armed people being crazy very close to me and attracting people even crazier than they are to the place where I live with my family.
And it seems like all is dying, and would leave the world to mourn
+6
Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
A Las Vegas couple who gunned down two police officers and a civilian before killing themselves apparently looked at law enforcement as oppressors, a sheriff's department official said Monday.
Among the clues: a "Don't Tread on Me" flag and a Nazi swastika the couple placed on one of the police officers they ambushed Sunday at a pizza restaurant. They also pinned onto the officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution," Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters.
"We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ... with Nazis," McMahill said. "In other words, they believe law enforcement is the oppressor."
...
A woman who says she lived near the couple told CNN affiliate KTNV that the married couple liked to dress up as the villainous Batman characters Joker and Harley Quinn.
The neighbor, Krista Koch, told the station the man also sometimes dressed as Slenderman, a fictional horror character that recently surfaced in the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin.
They were racist, sovereign citizen-believing geese who went to hang out with Cliven Bundy for a while, I don't think what else they were into really factors into this.
I'm sure we'll hear all about the heavy metal music they listened to next.
A Las Vegas couple who gunned down two police officers and a civilian before killing themselves apparently looked at law enforcement as oppressors, a sheriff's department official said Monday.
Among the clues: a "Don't Tread on Me" flag and a Nazi swastika the couple placed on one of the police officers they ambushed Sunday at a pizza restaurant. They also pinned onto the officer's body a note saying something to the effect of "this is the beginning of the revolution," Second Assistant Sheriff Kevin McMahill told reporters.
"We believe that they equate government and law enforcement ... with Nazis," McMahill said. "In other words, they believe law enforcement is the oppressor."
...
A woman who says she lived near the couple told CNN affiliate KTNV that the married couple liked to dress up as the villainous Batman characters Joker and Harley Quinn.
The neighbor, Krista Koch, told the station the man also sometimes dressed as Slenderman, a fictional horror character that recently surfaced in the stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin.
They were racist, sovereign citizen-believing geese who went to hang out with Cliven Bundy for a while, I don't think what else they were into really factors into this.
I'm sure we'll hear all about the heavy metal music they listened to next.
They probably played Grand Theft Auto, too.
Did they...
Did they play Dungeons and Dragons?
Battletag BYToady#1454
0
Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
*Gasp!*
0
HunterChemist with a heart of AuRegistered Userregular
Dungeons and Dragons is a gateway drug to satanism, premarital sex, and ritualistic murder.
Posts
I think I was playing a lot of Sim City
I was briefly placed in juvenile detention for attempting to summon a tornado.
basically, the lesson is that we need more of LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow in every 12 year old's life.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
"Are books to blame for children losing themselves in fantasy worlds of violence and rape? We here at CNN have mountains of evidence that they aren't but one paranoid and opinionated mother disagrees. We'll give them equal time to debate when we come back from the break."
The word used was specifically 'premeditation'. That was the concept I was discussing.
There is a huge leap in thought process and planning necessary for premeditated murder as compared to murder/man slaughter/whatever that a 12 year old is pretty much not capable of doing. That doesn't mean they're a semi-sentient pile of goo with no higher brain functions, but they're also not really going to pull some Hannibal Lector or Lex Luthor shit out of thin air.
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
Wrongfully and intentionally attempting to cause death? Yes.
Rationally considering timing? Yes.
Method? Yes.
To increase likelihood of success/avoid detection? Yes.
To evade or split guilt during the act? Yes.
Premeditation totally applies here. A 12 year old can plan out and execute a rational plan in a video game, a sports team, a term paper, or to save their family during a high speed collision, but when it comes to murder somehow they get a free pass? This doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
36 and still trying over here.
One day, goddammit.
On topic:
A series of full psychological evaluations and CT scans wouldn't do any harm for the two offenders; on some occasions, traumatic brain injury can simulate psychosis or sociopathy, sometimes even exacerbate previous physical or psychological trauma.
If there were patterns of physical or sexual abuse that arose in the investigation, and then we found out that one of the girls had a nasty head injury one time at softball practice which evidence shows to be an untreated concussion (or worse), then we start to get an idea of how the pieces are coming together. With the one girl saying that she felt no remorse, I'd hazard a guess that the conditions were ripe for some level of mental and/or psychological trauma to distort her view of fantasy and reality. Mental illness has both physical and environmental causes and they can be intertwined so that one type of damage reinforces the other, so on and so forth, like banging two tuning forks together.
And I think that might be a definite possibility here, but instead split into two different people: one girl with physical trauma and the other with psychological trauma, each of them feeding each other's mental instability in a fucked-up harmonic resonance.
Their escape plan was walking into the woods to find a fictional fucking mansion.
When I was 12, I regularly stole things from stores. I was a huge klepto. I don't steal from stores anymore, but I do take the occasional office supply home.
But back then, it was so easy. I would regularly take bags full of goodies from a store with a friend of mine.
Glad I never got caught. I guess I grew out of it?
Stuff that develops in an average 11-year-old brain:
1. Understanding flexibility of rules and reality - starting to question what they've been taught thus far.
2. Views of peers begin to do battle with those of parents.
3. Explore other "ways of being" alternate to their own experience.
Anecdotal evidence of what you were like at 12 years old aside, here are some things to consider about what happens in an average 12-year-old brain:
1. Thinking is only just starting to shift from concrete to abstract.
2. Starting to apply concepts learned in earlier developmental stages to abstract and hypothetical situations.
3. Increasing impact of peer pressure and desires to confirm with identified peers.
4. Prefrontal cortex not yet developed enough to properly manage functions like executive decision-making or risk assessment.
In girls, the prefrontal cortex develops more rapidly, usually already establishing skills like long-term planning and impulse control by the early teen years.
Okay so what that stuff basically boils down to is that your average 12 year-old is going to be looking at ways to challenge the rules and realities they know. They will do so as guided by their peers rather than their parents, and will start to hypothesize. They will latch on to abstract possibilities rather than sensory intake.
Stealing at that age is common for a reason. You know it's wrong because your parents have told you so, but what would happen, really, if you stole that candy? Would you get in trouble? Would someone get hurt? It'd make you happy though, because candy! What if you didn't get caught? Maybe we should find out! And it's exceedingly common for a kid to stare at a piece of candy, flipping yes/no/yes/no over in their heads multiple times, before either impulsively grabbing it (and damn the consequences!), just as impulsively refusing to grab it, or, more likely, getting distracted and forgetting about the dilemma all together.
Now, factor in neuroplasticity and the fact that your brain pathways can change and shift to accommodate new information over the lifespan. This means that pretty much any experience can be considered "normal" if you are exposed to it often enough and long enough, and have little evidence to the contrary. Some forms of this are a result of trauma - e.g., where you get so used to the presence of danger that your limbic system doesn't react anymore when you danger approaches. That's desensitization.
If these girls had been exposed to Slenderman stuff long enough and often enough that it is normalising, it makes sense that they have also been desensitized to a certain form of content. At their age, their thinking is becoming more sophisticated, which means they will start contemplating that content. Maybe they question it, wonder if it's real or not, or are challenged by their peers. They may experiment to see if it can be proven, or find other ways to deepen their understanding of the content. So they planned, hesitated, planned some more, waffled, and eventually weak impulse control (due to an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex) led to them actually acting.
You could even argue based on the above that if their parents had told them Slenderman is not real, it wouldn't have been enough, because they're at that developmental stage where they will challenge that.
Independent of your own anecdotal experiences of being 12, it is not outside the realm of possibility that these girls acted in precisely the way a 12 year old could be expected to act if the above is true. Though, if you wanted, you could argue that Slenderman becoming the norm at all for anyone is a sign of mental illness or a developmental delay.
So, were these girls mentally ill? We don't know, because we are not the people tasked with finding out. They could be, to lack the ability to identify death as permanent or the non-existence of a fictional figure or to demonstrate cruelty to another girl! Or they could be behaving exactly as you'd expect given their age and what their norms have been growing up. But those are also developmental questions every bit as much as they are mental health ones, because you're talking about still-growing brains. In a case like this, you cannot talk about mental health only to ignore developmental issues, or vice versa!
What they did was astonishingly disturbing and unique, and warrants much investigation. This obsession people have for Occam's Razor where it may not actually belong is just silly. The explanation is what it is, not the simplest version of all possible explanations.
3DS: 0232-8293-7683
Even in my layman mind exposing young, not fully developed and impressionable, brains to the worst of society instead of structured treatment is a surefire way to say "They're bad. Lets not try to fix anything and instead tell their parents to consider them a loss and try for a new one".
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Tough on crime approach works. Surely the US incarceration rate, being twice as high as the rest of the civilized world (topping Cuba, some of the most negative expectations for incarceration rates in china and being probably equal to the estimated incarceration rates of North Korea), has nothing at all to do with their approach to (or rather lack of) prisoner rehabilitation.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Somehow I feel the media may have played a role in this.
Coran Attack!
Maybe you did stupid things that ended up getting you hurt.
Maybe you believed stupid things.
Maybe you stole things.
Maybe you got in fights at school.
I'm not sure any of us planned out and executed attempted murder in the name of an internet meme at that age.
Coran Attack!
I think the point is that at that age your brain is still developing, so it's a bit more complicated than just 'oh yeah they're super crazy/dumb' and call it a day.
Just because the expression of those changes is more extreme than we're used to or might expect (much more so in this case) doesn't necessarily mean they're fundamentally different from the rest of us. We have no idea what their home life was like or what other issues they might have been going through, so we can't just write them off.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/09/justice/las-vegas-shooting/
GROOM HELD ON SUSPICION OF SLENDERMAN CONNECTION
police have arrested an entire funeral due to their apparent connection to the online myth slender man
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
"Dude, did you... you didn't piss off Cindy, did you? They got her 19 times and she didn't die! You're fucked, man"
WHEN YOU DRESS UP AS MR. SATAN YOU RIDE WITH HITLER. AND SATAN.
They were racist, sovereign citizen-believing geese who went to hang out with Cliven Bundy for a while, I don't think what else they were into really factors into this.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I'm sure we'll hear all about the heavy metal music they listened to next.
These people went to join a very real sit-in at a ranch FULL of people who are waving guns and yelling about a revolution and being above the law, and they did it not 45 minutes from where I live, after which they wandered into the city I live in and shot some people.
I do not care what they wore or what they listened to or what they ate for dinner, I only care that there is a group of heavily armed people being crazy very close to me and attracting people even crazier than they are to the place where I live with my family.
They probably played Grand Theft Auto, too.
Did they...
Did they play Dungeons and Dragons?
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist