*applauds marichko*
Outstanding. In fact I think you won me over too. I am behind you all the way !
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And how about in England, where those children lured the little boy out of the mall and killed him on the railroad tracks?
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This cae I remember very clearly. This was one of the occassions when I realised just how beastly ( and I mean that in it's literal sense) my own countrymen/women could be.
I watched it play out across my screen and inthe papers. First we saw again and again the footage the little toddler being taken off by the boys.....Then the trial.....the trail which has since been heavily criticised by the European High Court for being unfair.....why was it unfair? Because they tried and treated two children in the same manner as they would have tried an adult.
Murderers those boys might have been but they were also children. Not young men, children.
I have never in all my life felt quite so disgusted with my fellows than when I watched them hurl abuse and bottles and bricks at the Van carrying the two boys. Hurling themselves bodily at the doors and screaming ( many many of them) vengeance and death.....Grown men and women . Parents who have children of their own. ...So appalled were they at the murder of one child by two others, they sought to demonise the two boys to the point they were no longer children themselves.
What would they have done if the two boys had been thrown to them? Would they have kicked them to the ground and stamped on them? Would they have torn them limb from limb like the engared mob they appeared to be? I dont know. I do know the two children getting into the van and then getting out at the other end were terrified. One of them wasnt really sure why he'd followed his friend......but he was starting to feel quite sure he had just destroyed his life....if any of us had been able to step into that child's head for just a moment I shudder to think at the maelstrom we'd have found. .. Reading the descriptions of him crying into his mothers side whilst she held him after a particularly hard session of questioning left me in no doubt that this was a child. A killer yes, but a child also and a young one ( mentally) at that.
The good and decent parents who screamed for their blood and hurled glass bottles at their police van showed us al very clearly how much theyhated these murderous children. Why? I dont know . Perhaps they felt so shocked to find that children were capable of such things that sought to eradicate that posibilty from their mind. The children cannnot really be children they have lost their innocence....they are no longer protected by our knowledge of the world being so much greater than theirs....
I know, I know...They killed a little boy. A beautiful curly headed toddler who had done nothing but trust the two older boys who took him off to play......I know, they understood that what they did was wrong.....that whatthey had done was kill. These boys knew that killing was wrong. These boys knew that what they were doing was wrong at the time. .....But children dont really think like adults do. None of us can truly recall how our minds worked as children because we can only ever look back with the benefit of our fully developed cortex .....Children coceptualise in a different way....They may have known that they were killing and they may have known that killing is wrong and that death is final.....But I dont think they understood tjhose concepts in the same way an adult does. Children are too selfish to view it in the way we might. Even the best most generous and kind child is more selfish than their adult self ( Imo) ....They may have understood what they did in literal terms. But I dont think they related their actions to the consequences or extrapolated out the consequences beyond the immediate in the way most adults do.
I think ....the intensity of the reaction to a crime is proportionate to how much it disturbs our sense of the world as predictable. When children kill children ....it reintroduces us to our animal self and to a world which cannot be contained within law.