You do realize that the laws in Wisconsin require them to charge them as adults?
In other cases, I think certain juveniles are tried as adults, because the juvenile system can not adequately detain them based on their crimes.
I didn't know that about Wisconsin. But iirc, one of the lawyers spoke about trying to get the kids moved to juvenile court. So if I did recall that correctly, it must be possible after a charge, right?
The 50's were not oppressive to anyone I know. If they were oppressive it was because someone chose the wrong mate or settled for something they did not want. My grandmother worked during the war making bombers. My mother was a nurse and a hairdresser. I don't know one woman who was raised in th 50's that did not have a life of her own. To say a whole era was oppressive to woman is nonsense. Everyone makes their life what they want it to be. Donna Reed who did that show was the producer of her show. She did not just sit and do lines she was the one producing it. There are many many awesome woman that came out of the 50's.
But one of the good things was that it was a decade that was still about humanness. It was still face to face communication. Even the 60's and 70's and to some degree the 80's and then it all changed. DO I believe that computers are evil? Nope. But I believe that kids need to be monitored when using them and they need real live interaction with people that show them empathy and compassion and sympathy for other humans. Online nothing matters. You can be powerful in your nasty words. You can be someone.. Even if it is all in your mind.
To me this smacks of two kids with a pack mentality after being immersed in this slenderman legend. I They are vulnerable because of their age and hormones, development. Do I think they need more than jail? Yes. But I don't see mental illness. Not in 2 together. I see a plan and I see disconnection.
Well, the war was during the 40's, not the 50's. The 40's was a time of vocational independence for women in America which ended abruptly upon the end of the war. Men needed their jobs back. It was a time of unprecedented economic boom during which one earner was enough to take care of a family, for many people. Thus, the marriage age dropped, women in college became a rarity and the culture morphed to suddenly constraining women to the home as the ideal and most feminine role.
This was a huge departure from the decade before. In fact, single earner man-as-bread-winner homes really didn't exist until 1920. Before that, both parents usually worked- many women working on their farms or in factories or creating textiles or selling products, etc. Much more than raising the kids and housekeeping.
Really, that one decade is the only time that is known, in America, for women typically being stay at home moms and homemakers. By the 60's, millions of those same women had divorced as the divorce rate skyrocketed. That's likely because in their 30's, with no more small children to look after, yet still being young and with a full life ahead of them, many were just bored.
Also, by the 60's, the rate of women going to college skyrocketed again and women began entering the professions.
Although many women survived and even thrived during the 50's (my mom was one, although she turned 20 in 1956), that does not mean the 50's was not an oppressive time for women in general.
The options for women were few and the attitudes they had to deal with to be able to be more than a mom or to actually even be able to be a secretary, nurse, teacher, babysitter or stylist, the only real options for those few who actually worked, were daunting. It is a historical fact that women faced oppression during the 1950's culturally and legally.
But that doesn't mean there weren't some great things about it. Having a parent home all day and a neighborhood filled with the same, having tv be a Novelty, not a babysitter or a pivotal part of daily life, not having the internet or video games, or too much homework, playing outside from the moment school
Ended to the time the street lights turned on, all those things were excellent parts of the 50's.
I think access to mind numbing, repetitive and graphic materials via technology is not good for growing brains or fragile minds of any age. I too, like many people here, was fascinated with some scary stuff as a middle schooler. But my mom worked hard to dissuade me from reading such materials.
It has an effect. Maybe a scary movie here or there is okay, but for teens and younger, whose brains are not fully cooked, who have impulse control issues and are going through raging hormone and body changes, dealing with peer acceptance, and, for those who are most unlucky, suffering through the first signs of emerging mental disorders which often surface during this time, constant exposure to such materials can have a profoundly negative effect.
Yes, millions of kids are exposed and don't murder. But I don't know one kid in the last 10 years who murdered who wasn't exposed to repetitive violence or other graphic materials via technology. pretty much all of them were obsessed with something violent online, it appears.
As I stated above, every era has it's problems. I hope we can keep working to learn from the past and try to fix what doesn't work in the present.
They have evil written all over their faces. It's there, just look. Their faces do not show well adjusted kids to me. They are not mentally ill, jmo They are evil, plain and simple. I hope they get the max, 60 years iirc.
Yeah, they just had very calm, stoic faces. No trace of alarm or sadness. No obvious signs of something wrong upstairs like the Arizona creep or the Colorado creeps.
That troubles me quite a bit. One would think young girls that age in such circumstances would be visibly terrified, exhausted, upset. Nope. Nothing.
Of course one would think it would be hard for two young psychopaths to meet as well. What are the odds?
It depends where you lived.
I am not getting into a racial debate. My point is that the past decades before the computer age and the rampant use of cell phones and electronic devices by kids was better for kids.
Just the nature of this crime shows that this immature kids were left to hours and hours of fantasizing and not getting any reality checks. They don't have balance.
I don't disagree. What you are saying has merit.
I've just been lurking, but spice has made a lot of good points that need to be made, I don't think cherry picking this one sentence is fair. And I know you've been around WS long enough to know that these points come up over and over again, both that some people observing crime cases *do* have certain reflex reactions to make themselves feel better, especially when the end result lets them get to "that'll never be / never happen to my child"; and that some posters cannot understand that wanting to understand why and how criminals are "broken" (mentally ill) is not the same as wanting to cut them a break from all consequences.
In general, aimed at no one, the cases with child perpetrators always get ugly. I think it would help if people stopped and reconsidered what their gut tells them--not everyone's gut can be right at the same time.
Excellent point. Perhaps we need to differentiate between guesses based on probability and real gut instinct. I do think we over use the term. Gut is when you have a strong presentiment that danger is lurking or may occur or that someone is a danger even though others find him or her charming.
