"slender Man" Stabber Mentally Incompetent?

[Verona]

One of the two 12 year old Wisconsin girls accused of viciously stabbing a young friend almost to death to gain favor with a fictional character known as Slender Man has been examined by two doctors who say she's mentally incompetent, and it's looking like the attorney for the second 12 year old girl may be pursuing this route for his client as well.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/03/slender-man-recedes-in-wisconsin-stabbing-case-as-mental-health-becomes-issue/

 

 

How the heck do 12 year olds become "mentally incompetent"? Is this some kind of legal smoke & mirrors?? What turns a 12 year old into a killer?

 

[arissa]

What can turn anyone into a killer? I have a friend who is legally "crazy" and has been since a very young age. She did not turn out to be a killer by any means and she is actually pretty darn smart but she will always have the same legal name for it that will follow her for life.

[CraigD]

Verona, on 03 Jul 2014 - 10:20 AM, said:

How the heck do 12 year olds become "mentally incompetent"? Is this some kind of legal smoke & mirrors??

Though this question is legal and sociological, not psychological, I think it’s very relevant.

 

I think, as do the authors of this 2 July Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, that defending attorney Joseph Smith had 12-year-old defendant Morgan Geyser deemed by psychiatrists not legally competent, rather than attempting to having her not stand trial at all (which, according to Wisconsin law, a legally incompetent person cannot do), he’s attempting to having her tried as a juvenile rather than an adult, a legal procedure called a “reverse waiver”.

 

Given that Geyser and her co-defendant Anissa Weier are only 12 years old, this makes sense to me. I believe prosecutors are increasingly too inclined to charge children as adults, because people convicted as adults can receive greater sentences than children charged as juveniles. Many states (such as Pennsylvania, but not, I believe, Wisconsin) currently have laws requiring that people be charged as adults for crimes such as murder, regardless of their age.

 

As a judicial balance, the presiding judge can decide to transfer cases such as Geyser and Weier’s to juvenile court.

 

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What turns a 12 year old into a killer?

I don’t think anything turns children or adults into killers. Rather, I believe nearly all people physically capable of it can be killers.

 

Even very young children have and often act on curiosity about killing, so commonly that, in moderation, such thoughts and actions aren’t necessarily considered a sign of psychopathy or other mental illness. Most children don’t try to kill other children, or if they do, they try to kill children much smaller and weaker than themselves. More commonly, children kill non-human animals.

 

I doubt there will be, or should be, much detailed psychological information about Geyser and Weier, until years after their trials are over, so we can only speculate now in a general way.

 

Most 12-year-old children are less capable to making correct important decisions than older children and adults. In Geyser and Weier’s case, whether they thought they it was OK to kill their also-12-year-old friend, thought stabbing her wouldn’t kill her, thought they would not be caught and punished, thought the consequences of being caught would not be severe, or thought something different, they clearly made very bad decisions.

 

Though it differs in many ways from Geyser and Weier’s case, I’m reminded of the 1993 murder of 2-year-old James Bulger by 10-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Thompson and Venables were convicted of murder in English court, sentenced to life imprisonment, and after 8 years detention in a special juvenile facility, released on “life licence” (equivalent to US courts’ “parole”). Venables was imprisoned again in 2010 for child pornography. Thompson remains on life licence.

 

Thompson and Venables are the youngest people convicted of murder in modern (1900+) history.

 

Cases like Geyser and Weier and Thompson and Venables, in which criminal charges are brought against children for murder or attempted murder, are very rare (<10 in modern history), but I suspect, that while still very rare, there have been many time this number, most having been dismissed as accidents.

[LaurieAG]

How the heck do 12 year olds become "mentally incompetent"? Is this some kind of legal smoke & mirrors?? What turns a 12 year old into a killer?

 

The media channel content watched as they grow up.

 

Just go through each decade and map out the evolution of the respective children's media channels (movies, TV, internet etc) and their content since the 1960's and you will notice what is different. 

 

Many people these days do not know what it would be like to spend the first 10 years of their childhood without being continually marketed at via TV etc. 

[Fractal]

I remember when my kids were growing up, I did not have cable TV. It was a choice I made. When they complained, I told them something to the effect that "free" TV was bad enough and I wasn't going to pay good money so they could watch another few dozen of channels of crap.... (Can you tell I was totally anti-television?!!)

 

Of course, they watched crap TV --- er, I mean cable --- at friends' houses, so it's not like they were never exposed.

 

As an aside, I never let my kids have toy guns or knives, either.

 

I know, I know.... totally unrealistic these days.

[Buffy]

I am one of those parents who recklessly let her kid watch a lot of teevee, including cable. In fact, I think cable has helped protect kids from the stuff that our parents used to try to keep us from watching. When there is 24 hour kid programming on Disney, Nickelodeon and all their spin-offs, the kids don't watch half the gore and violence that I did when I was her age.

Now keeping them from flipping to other channels can be a bit of a challenge, but I'm either incredibly lucky to have a kid with the right genes, or there is something to be said for the power of taboo: the best way to get a kid to do something--especially teenagers--is to tell them they can't. I didn't censor, but I watched and saw my kid self-censor. Which theory is the one that caused this outcome? Well, I think it's a little bit of both, which I'll come back to.

There's also the issue of simply becoming a functional human in our information-overloaded society: Obviously this is a chicken-egg issue, but if you don't teach your kids early to deal with the information fire hose, they're not going to be functional in society. One side effect is that information-naive kids are going to take the bad stuff a lot more seriously, and there may be something to be said for letting them expose themselves at their own pace.

As an aside, there can be unexpected results from the "evil of teevee": My kid was in her teens before she realized that teevee came without closed captioning which is always on on all of our sets. She watched what seemed to be the average number of hours of teevee for her generation, but she's a really voracious reader, and has done quite well academically.

The bottom line I think is that people want to find a single point of failure for all of these horrible events. It's very hard to come up with evidence that in cases like this the media "had no influence whatsoever": that's patently absurd when the stated motivation is directly linked to a specific work spread through the media. But it's also true that while our media has changed and intensified, it's actually got it's roots in works that go back centuries. I still get shivers reading Macbeth, and literature going back to the earliest examples are on a percentage basis probably much more obsessed with death--and gruesome death at that--than what we have today.

But at the same time, one of the most horrifying realizations about situations like this is "that could be me." Yes, if your genes were a little different, you could be that 12 year-old girl. No one likes that, so it's easier to externalize it. But the fact is that psychological problems are the real root cause of people seeing the same "horrifying" media and one kills while the rest do not.

Should we censor the media? That's a tough call, and why I appeal to that "power of taboo" I mentioned above. We used to ban pornography. Legalizing it has caused it's own problems but those problems expose issues that have been hidden and need discussing in the open like society's generally sexist attitude and the treatment of women as inferiors or that they should be submissive. Oddly enough that "problem" with most pornography isn't a pornography issue, it's a societal one, it just creates a laser-like focus on that foundational issue.

Should we pay a whole lot more attention to psychological problems? You bet. And guess what? Those problems have been considered "taboo" by society too, so we're just exposing them now. The way that society treats those with mental disabilities is criminal and keeps people from seeking treatment when they need it, and that in my mind is the most effective thing we can do to lessen the likelihood that these things will occur in the future.


The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities, :phones:
Buffy

[Verona]

Buffy, your comment we should pay more attention to psychological problems really hit a nerve with me. I wonder what "warning" signs were present in these two 12 year old girls prior to the incident. Surely there were clues that a parent or teacher could have picked up on.

 

Even today there is a stigma surrounding psychological disorders. No one wants their kids to be labeled so they don't even take them for testing for fear that they will.

[arissa]

If you don't let your kids experience certain things in life it is going to come back to bite you. I am not saying put their hand over a hot stove, but I guess I kind of am at the same time. And on this note, do you know that people are sickly leaving "slender man" notes on peoples doorsteps and work places (like their desk). That is not kids doing it, it is adults. That is really sick to think about.

[CraigD]

arissa, on 18 Jul 2014 - 12:39 PM, said:

And on this note, do you know that people are sickly leaving "slender man" notes on peoples doorsteps and work places (like their desk).

I’ve not heard of anyone getting a Slender Man note on the doorstep or at their work place. Do you have a credible source (ie, not an interview on AM Coast to Coast) that this is happening, arissa :QuestionM

 

The main point of news stories like post #1’s is that the role of the Slender Man, a horror fictional character, has been much overblown, largely due to overly credulous reporting of two people in the wake of reporting of the arrests of Geyser and Weier, one an unidentified woman television news reporter Karin Johnson believes was attacked with a knife by her mentally ill 13-year-old daughter, another by a neighbor of Jerad and Amanda Miller, anti-government activists who killed 3 people then themselves 8 June 2014 in Las Vegas US-NV, who states that Jerad sometimes costumed himself as the Slender Man, sometimes the Batman comic character the Joker.

 

 

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That is not kids doing it, it is adults. That is really sick to think about.

As the linked-to Wikipedia article above explains, the Slender Man was invented 5 years ago, and was little known outside of internet horror circles until the Geyser and Weier case. Like much to most dark horror fiction, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to characterize this fiction as “sick”, but as a genre, horror fiction is arguably the oldest. According to its creator Eric Knudsen (penname Victor Surge), the Slender Man draws from the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, William S. Burroughs, and Steven King. I’ve read much more Lovecraft, Burroughs, and King than I have Knudsen and other somethingawful.com writers, but find the work of these 3 well-known authors sickly darker than these less well-known ones.

 

Through his publicists, Knudsen stated that “I am deeply saddened by the tragedy in Wisconsin and my heart goes out to the families of those affected by this terrible act,"

 

Similarly to how theses few present day attacks are being blamed on Slender Man stories. Steven King’s 1977 novel Rage was blamed for several school shootings, because the perpetrators were found to have spoken of and had copies of the novel in their possession at the time of their crimes. In 1997, King began encouraging publishers and libraries to remove Rage from circulation, out of concern that it might really be contributing to such tragedies.

[Gregb]

This happened in my area. I went to their middle school :(