The Milwaukee Post

8 • Milwaukee County Post • June 13, 2014 OPINION Question of the week Should the two 12-year-old girls accused in the Waukesha stabbing incident be sent to juvenile court? "Yes, try those kids in adult court. At the same time, try their parents in the court of public opinion. Where were these three sets of parents when this was going on? Weren't their kids being properly moni- tored. I thought that supervising your kids is what good parenting is all about. It's a terrible tragedy that has scarred the lives of three youngsters forever. Let's hope this is a wake-up call for parents everywhere. Tough love to me is true love, and that's what this horrific episode is all about." – Don Meyer Oak Creek *** "Both kids should be psychologically evalu- ated before going any farther as far as adult or juvenile court. I don't believe there's any previous records. There's something des- perately wrong, and I believe it's mental." – Noah Borkenhagen Franklin *** "We are living in an age when too much information and the ease of its availability (via the Internet) is within reach of virtual- ly anyone, including very young and impres- sionable youths. I must admit that a firm precedent is needed to establish responsi- ble action for the heinous crimes "kids" are committing so often these days.That means very tough treatment of juveniles found guilty. All parents should be actively involved in their children's activities (espe- cially Internet usage), to teach them moral precepts along with what a conscience is and for them to understand and consider the consequences of their actions. Sad to say, if these girls are found to be mentally competent, they should be tried as adults (but not necessarily be given a life sen- tence)." – J. R. Zmuda Milwaukee *** This week's question How do you feel about county clerks issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples before the court case in the matter is concluded? Editor's note: When responding to the Question of the Week, please include your full name with spelling, phone number and city where you live. Phone numbers will not be pub- lished. Anonymous responses are no longer accepted by the publication. Call 744-6370, Ext. 15 and leave a brief answer. Readers may also send an email with a brief answer to: dbut- ler@conleynet.com. Trying to make sense of it all By JESSICA MCBRIDE I guess we've got our own Leopold and Loeb. I'm just stunned they're 12 and liv- ing down the street in Waukesha. Leopold and Loeb were wealthy law stu- dents (ages 18 and 19) who murdered a 14- year-old together in 1924 in Chicago because they wanted to commit the perfect crime. Both received life in prison. Their influence? Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of a Superman. Or maybe the Waukesha horror story more closely mirrors the death of James Bulger in Great Britain in 1993. Just 2, Bulger was abducted and killed by two 10- year-olds. They tortured the boy and left him on a railroad track. They served only eight years in juvenile centers and were released back into society with new iden- tities. Some claimed the boys were influ- enced by the movie "Child's Play 3." It's hard to predict what will influence a warped mind – or soul. When I was a reporter, I covered sever- al cases of very young killers. Wisconsin law was toughened in 1996 after a 13-year- old girl killed a caregiver (she became the youngest child in Wisconsin history at that time convicted as an adult of homi- cide). In 2002, a group of Milwaukee youths beat and killed Charlie Young Jr. One was only 10. He was found not fit to stand trial. Another was 13; he was charged as an adult but ended up with a juvenile dis- position. Around that same time, a case of a Michigan 11-year-old and Florida 14-year-old fueled growing debate about how to handle the worst child offend- ers. The 1996 case provoked toughening of how Wisconsin law handled child crimes for those ages 10 and up – the most serious would now be handled in adult court auto- matically (although younger children could still be sent back into juvenile court) and 17-year-olds were considered adults. I bring all of this up to point out that what happened in Waukesha the other day was horrific, however it is not a new debate. The notion of younger offenders committing unspeakable crimes has been around for a while, sadly – and, in some cases, before the Internet. I suspect there's not a singular answer to explain how these two girls allegedly turned fiction into real- ity and acted on it. Perhaps evil is static and not understandable. It's easy to blame the parents here (and one parent's apparent death metal inter- ests). Or we could blame the purveyors of the girls' supposed inspiration Slender Man (but that's just the Internet version of a campfire ghost story). We could blame societal fragmentation and children's desensitization to violence through the Inter net, video games, and Hollywood (especially those not instilled with proper boundaries and morals by parents, churches, and schools). But lots of kids are exposed to those things and don't decide to kill. We can urge parents to mon- itor their children's Internet history, but I monitor my kid's Internet history, and she had heard of Slender Man anyway (I guess it's an Internet version of the boogey- man). Was it evil or mental illness or immatu- rity within girls lacking the boundaries to appreciate the wrongness of their con- duct? That will be for courts to decide. Maybe it's not either/or. Maybe further details will make it clearer. I am baffled as to what could lead two girls this young to allegedly do something like this (and if you somehow missed the news, they allegedly plotted out and then stabbed a young classmate to become proxies of Slender Man. Thankfully, this girl lived and is improving). I am also baf- fled as to what makes anyone commit any heinous crime that we read about in the news, though, whether it's the Columbine killers (and the video game "Doom") or the "Virgin Killer" son of a Hollywood director. You can't blame the guns this time because they used knives. So it's not the instrument. You can't allege the girls were immersed in a community of vio- lence, because they weren't (off the Internet, anyway). You can't allege they were products of bad schools. I think there's some truth to the argu- ment that the Internet is desensitizing and creating less empathy and humanness (we're all avatars), and society, communi- ty, and family has fragmented and that children may not understand the reality of violence because they're so steeped in the fake and consequence-less violence in movies, TV, and video games (and, yes, Internet horror stories). They lack the grounding of community, family, and reli- gion in some cases. I suppose it's easier to act if you've grown up with images of vio- lence that had no impact, no real blood, and no feelings, and no code was instilled in you that says, "Don't. This is wrong." It will be interesting to learn whether one girl was more dominant than the other (which often happens in pairs, such as father-and-son duo James and Theodore Oswald. Of course, that pair had an age difference.) The system must grapple with punish- ment. DA Brad Schimel has vowed to try to keep the case in adult court. I think he's right due to the alleged calculation involved and seriousness; however, it's hard to imagine that, with 12-year-olds, we should throw away the key. (Jessica McBride is a member of the journalism faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Waukesha res- ident. Her column runs occasionally in The Post.) No good answers yet in stabbing case McBride

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