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A Unique Perspective on a 'Game-Related' Tragedy
Megnatron writes "Penny Arcade has a letter from the stepmother of one of the kids who was recently charged with killing a homeless man. Her article is an extremely sobering tale of the problems dealing with troubled teen. She explains how, in this situation, the parents did everything they possibly could. And, in a refreshing twist, she absolves the games industry of any blame for the tragedy these kids perpetrated. From her missive: 'Video games DID NOT make this kid who he was, and it's unfortunate that the correlation is there. The thing that really gets me with this whole thing is that the kid knows full well that by equating what he's done to a video game, that he will generate controversy and media coverage. It makes me sick that the media is jumping all over this, because that is exactly the result that he wants. The only good thing (if there is such a thing) that has come out of this whole ordeal is that the kid is behind bars. That is exactly where he needs to be.'" Her letter is a passionate, troubling story, but well worth reading.
I'm wondering, has PA actually verified that this person is related to the kid, or are they just another AC?
But I'm curious how PA has verified that this person is who she claims to be.
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I usually like to blame the parents, as it is often their fault. You read these stories where the parents had no idea what was going on (Colombine: pipe bomb building in the garage???). Or where the parent just defends them ("Little Johnny never would have done that. The other kids made him do it.").
I gotta say reading that was kind of scary. If I had to take a guess I'd say he is a sociopath (literally), but that's just a guess. He is obviously very intelligent (calling people abusers). The fact they kept investigating it doesn't surprise me (what if it was true one of those times) but he knew how to get power. Kids can also act out like that if they are being abused, so that would lend "credibility".
I'm sure the divorces and remarriages in his life didn't help, but if it really is sociopathic, that probably wouldn't matter. I can offer suggestions of things that might have helped him (if he was help-able). Military boot camp, having him sent to jail those times the police came. Making him a ward of the state. Trying to give him possession of his own life (can't remember the term, basically having him declared an independent adult).
She said she tried "everything" so I don't know which of those were done. I'm amazed that she put up with it for so long.
This kid is REALLY the exception to the rule. He would have been exactly the same if this happened in 1960.
Too bad this kid will probably be the example of what video games do to kids that the media trots out constantly.
People like him (from her description, assuming it's true), are one of the things that make me believe in true evil.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The parent post is correct, but neglects the salient point that when I was a kid (i'm 37), a valid response to the conditions noted would be to send the kid to a military school where they'd do the beating for you.
Yeah, those got tamed by the leftist social theorists too.
So basically we have to wait for the pathetic scum to kill innocents before we do anything about it. Great improvement. Kudos to the 60's crowd for doing us a real service, yet again.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
...beating doesn't work either. He's a full blown psychopath, and about all you can do is drug him into a stupor or lock him up. We don't know how to fix them. Would probably be kinder (for him AND the other prisoners) to euthanize him. Much better than graduating him from prison in 15 years...he's going to be a real, grown up monster then, with all that lovely prison lore and culture burned into him. You can blame the liberals AND the conservatives for his continued existence. I think he falls under both of their "sacredness of life" category.
Just because it has a humanoid form does not make it human.
Sadly, the children know this and manipulate it. Have been doing so for a very long time -- they know you have no actual authority over them if they choose not to listen to you. You can't actually compel them in any way to listen.
There were enough cases of child abuse in the past that all of the agencies are now required by law to investigate all claims of abuse. Denial by the accused abusers is basically ignored as all guilty people would deny it. They basically have to presume you're guilty in order to try to protect the child's welfare (it's well meaning, but not often reliable). And, in the end, it's difficult to disprove such claims.
(I know someone going through court now because a neighbor witnessed him hoist his child into the car, and then claimed she saw/though she saw him smacking the child around. When his wife decided to leave him for his best friend, she started coaching the 4 year old into claiming daddy was touching her in bad places -- in court, the child has admitted that mommy told her to say that. On the heels of the first erroneous claim, the second claim of now sexual abuse is very hard to dispell: basically it's compounded on him. Such things get very ugly quick.)
I find it scary that a child who is repeatedly in trouble could fool the teachers into thinking "I didn't do it, and by the way, my parents abused me". Especially when this child was over 6 feet and over 200lbs -- a very big 14 year old indeed.
I realize you can't suddenly start treating all accusations lightly, for fear of ignoring the problem. But, there has to be a better way of looking into these things. Unfortunately, an unfounded claim of abuse can ruin your life just as quickly and easily as a verifiable, documented case of abuse -- people will go after you with equal zeal and tar you with the same brush.
The fact that repeatedly, police and school officials were told that this kid was way out of control is scary indeed. The fact that an apparent "thrill kill" had to take place before anyone would believe them is appalling. Hopefully at least something good comes out of this in the long run.
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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The kid is a sociopath.
People want to believe that any kid can be steered right, that anybody can be reasoned with, and that there are no truly bad people. Unfortunately, kids like this shatter that fairy tale. People like this kid, and several kids I know of personally, aren't reachable by conventional means.
Couldn't something be done? Probably. But society isn't equipped to deal with people who are radically outside the norm. It's much easier to lock them up, place the blame, and move on. Am I saying it's not the kid's fault? No, I'm not. He murdered someone, and he knew exactly what he was doing.
What I'm saying is that he didn't have the mental barriers against killing someone that normal people do. Whatever people have that make them right wasn't present in this kid.
How can society deal with people that either don't fit in with society or reject it entirely? Is it even a solvable problem? I feel that figuring this out, above all else, will be what defines the next great Age of humanity.
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions. Saying someone is "born bad" is equivilant to saying that they have been possessed by Satan. It's not a valid argument.
I'll will admit that people can be born with violent temperaments. They can be born with harsh attitudes or a lack of empathy. However all but the most severely mentally disabled are born with free will and the ability to reason. People may not intuatively understand right from wrong, but they still know what is acceptable and what is not.
This is why I don't accept the argument that someone is not responsible for their actions because they've had a "hard life" or were "born bad" or live in a "bad neighbourhood". I can be sympathetic, but ultimately I must insist that people take responsibilty for the decisions they have made. I don't think it's a lot to ask.
Blaming society, or genetics, or your parents, or video games or anything else for decisions you yourself have made is an insult to everyone who does accept the consequences of their actions. It's an insult to your own dignity as you are claiming you have lost your own free will.
There are people in this world who were born with physical and mental disabilities. People who have suffered accidents, abuse, insult, poverty and hardship of every kind. Even people who play video games. And most of these people live their lives, despite having to work that much harder at them. They overcome their problems, make an honest living and contribute to the society they live in. Often they contribute more than other more fortunate individuals. Even people with violent personalities or troubled pasts can still find a positive place in society.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
This kid could have lead a better life. He chose not to. It had nothing to do with his mental chemistry. That was solid enough to allow him to dress himself every morning, walk without stumbling and converse with people when he needed to. He wasn't born bad. He chose to be bad. His parents didn't make that choice. Neither did his genes, or his playstation, or his neighbourhood. He did. Anything else is just an excuse.
May the Maths Be with you!
After reading the "stepmother's" reply I have to say yea it probably was the parent's fault. This kid seems to have been tossed back and forth between the "father" and the mother. The stepmother's language in her reply was what I would expect for a high school kid and not a parent of a child. In all the discussion of what they did and didn't do, I at no time heard the word love. I heard hate a lot but not love. Yea this kid might have had issues from the start but I have to say that didn't sound like he had much of a chance with the parents he had.
Yes he was unmanageable at 15 but what about at two? How about at five? How much love and time did he get at seven?
Read a bit more closely, and you'll catch this bit:
I am sorry this got so long. I have been reading PA since the very beginning, and I feel that both of you are very much like me. I think we are the same age (29) and I have been a lifelong gamer like the two of you.
If she's 29, then she would have been around 14 when the kid was born -- and remember, she describes herself as a kind-of stepmother. It sounds like she didn't get involved until he was already a teenager -- too late for her to have much impact, especially if she was only in her mid-20's herself.
So we can't draw any conclusions about her bad parenting when he was a baby. Also, note that he was living with his dad until he decided to leave -- and move in with his natural mom, who had even less control over the situation. If we must conclude that nurture had a larger role than nature, then we have to look at her role, long before the letter's author was involved.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I really don't understand how you can blame the parents based on the information provided. Sure, the parents split up, but there are plenty of parents who divorce or separate and still have well-adjusted children. Beyond that, we simply have no idea what this kid's childhood was like. We also have no idea how long the stepmother has been on the scene, so I don't see how you can expect her to comment on how much love the child received at any specific age, much less support any conclusions based on the presence or absence of the word "love" in a letter.
It seems like a great modern fad (and fallacy) to blame parents for every lousy thing a kid does, as if people have become desperate to take nature out of the classic "nature vs. nurture" argument. But none of us are shaped purely by our environment, as the mention of the kid's younger brother being reasonably well-adjusted supports. We all have judgement and free will, so unless some actual evidence surfaces to support the notion that the parents somehow meaningfully contributed to these horrible acts, let's place blame back on the kid who committed them, shall we?
Some people are not psychologically designed to respond to stimulus the same way; some are visual learners, some are auditory, some learn better from example and demonstration, some more from reading, some from fidgeting around with things till they understand how it operates.
Some are born completely without the ability to discern cause and effect, and some are born with a complete psychological immunity to corrective tactics.
Some are pathological liars.
Yes, you can be "born bad." I've seen it many times. There are schoolteachers who think "no kid is really a bully" and try to "understand" everyone: these schoolteachers are retarded fucktards who let bullying happen.
The same goes for the retarded fucktards who took the kid's word over the parents who were screaming for protection and help in trying to discipline him.
Word to the cops: if the PARENTS are begging you to put him in jail and prosecute, WHAT THE FUCK do you think you're doing handing him back off?
Those cops should be fired for laziness and incompetence.
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions.
What makes you say that? Free will is an assumption, not a scientific fact.
When you argue that people are "born bad" or otherwise don't have free will, you're arguing that all these people are wasting their time. That they will never overcome their difficulties and they should either give up an committ a crime, cause trouble, go insane or just kill themselves. That is a flawed assumption. We all have the power to change our own lifes, and to alter the course of our lives. That's what seperates humans from animals.
In a sense, that's irrelevant to society, however. Philosophically it's all well and good, and well worth debating into the long, dark hours of the night.
Society as a whole is (or should be) unconcerned. If a human CHOOSES to act like a wild animal - in fact, worse than one if you concede free will - he should be treated as one: caged, cared for to a minimal standard of care, and ultimately if not able to behave within norms that society sets - euthanized.
For example, I know that Alfonso Rodruiguez was someobody's little boy, once. But now (after his rape and murder of Dru Sjodin) he is simply a human-shaped dangerous nuisance that it is in the public interest to remove.
As far as the OP's lad, he's not stupid. He knows that society will give him chance after chance after chance, in the vain hope that he will develop something analogous to a conscience. Why should we bother? Because of "Human compassion"? Pull the other one - I have more pre-emptive compassion for his next victim than I ever would for him.
-Styopa
What makes me suspicious is when she claims that social workers and counselors that previously took the kid's side are now calling to apologize and say they wish they had believed the parents.
Um, bullshit. Yeah, I'm so sure that some government worker picked up the phone to say, "oh hi, this is Frank. Remember me? I'm the guy who was investigating you for abuse? How are you guys doing? Cool. Cool. Listen, I just wanted to apologize for all that, 'almost sending you to jail' thing ok? Well, take it easy. Please don't sue me. Bye."
She's lying about that part *at the very least*
Do you know what the letter was in response too? She has the right to tell her side of the story when someone accuses her of failing or screwing up. She did not "sell out" this child. This child sold himself out when he went and MURDERED a man then played with his corpse. This kid has a HISTORY of ABUSING HANDIFUCKINGCAPED children. You know what else. He learned that he could get away with it to, as long as he said the right things.
She did not betray him. She did not sell him out. There was nothing to sell out in the first place. Hell what do you want her to do. Is she supposed to defend him? How do you defend a child like this? He was from a broken home, fine. He murdered someone. You either jail him, jail him for life in solitary, execute him, or give him a free pass because he couldn't fucking cope with the same shit alot of other kids do. What do you do when he gets out of jail and kills again? Another free pass? Hell the woman tried to do what she could.
You mad
Believe it or not the boy would be different.
After being abused and mistreated for years by people he hated and looked down on, with his strong disregard for other humans?
Yeah, he'd probably have killed a handful of them.
...of all evil in the universe. I knew the liberals hated America, and wanted Osama Bin Ladin to be president, but I hadn't realized that they also wanted bums to be beaten to death. The bastards!
Had the conservative policies been in place, maybe he would have been locked up sooner, but I can guarentee he would have been fucking up kids in Juvie...creating more little monsters out of kids that already had problems. Sooner or later they would have let him out, too. Maybe the life of that bum would have been saved...but only if you lock the kid up forever before he kills anybody. You have to weigh the risk of him doing serious damage against the probablility he's just freaking out on hormones and will straighten out. A potential wasted teenager vs. a potential wasted old bum.
Locking people up with other messed up people doesen't tend to make any of them less messed up...and for the most part you have to let them out someday. Prison does not rehabilitate anybody, or serve as much of a deterrent to crime....all you have to look at is the recividism rates to know that. What comes out is worse than what went in. It's cruel and pointless, and its only done because we as a society can't quite bring ourselves to put down dangerous animals of our own species.
Ideally, we could spend the cash to get our prisons under control, and make a real effort to rehabilitate. If rehabilitation fails, the person is euthanized. Unfortunately, our government is way too incompentant and corrupt to do this in a sane or just manner...so we have...what we have...courtesy of the Prison Guards Union.
His mother couldn't do jack shit.
He figured out a way around everything.
And that's a terrible waste, but an inevitable consequence of spending a child's entire adolescence teaching them that they are accountable to someone other than themself, when ultimately, goodness comes from within and true goodness only comes out when you hold yourself accountable above all other people (i.e. Do you do right because you want to do what is right or because you are compelled to by real or implied force?)
The kid didn't care about "right." He did what he felt like doing, and that was that. He was a fucked up sociopath, completely self-centered, manipulative, and abusive. He was a kid born bad and that was that, and doing any less wouldn't have given him any reason to change that or be nicer to anyone else. He wasn't "acting out" to prove that they had no control over him, he already knew that they had no control over him, he could game the system any way he pleased, and that was that.
Maybe if he'd been chucked into juvie, it could have been different. I doubt it, but it could have.
Letting him run amok doing whatever? If you think that would do any good, you just go back to hitting the bong and being a good little moron.
I challenge you to define 'choose'.
If it means "the behaviors selected by the person's neurons", then 'choose' is meaningless: it simply means that they do whatever their brain must (as a physical object) lawfully do in the situation. In this case, it is easy to image a corrupt brain, in the sense that the neural potentials favor sadistic outcomes.
If, however, it means "causelessly or spiritually imposing a decision upon physical matter", then you have an even bigger problem: how does anyone choose to do bad things? Is it then their spirit (or whatever) that is corrupt?
So, stating that we "choose our own actions" is useless. Actually it's worse than useless because not only does the statement fail to convey any data, but it makes it harder for a discussion to focus on the exact locus of sadistic behaviors. These days, the word 'choose' has become the ultimate hand-wave. As your statement shows, it has come to mean "Human decisions are unconnected to reality, so abandon this line of inquiry altogether."
I rather think that behavior is absolutely connected to my brain's content and state. And that is why me-the-person can be considered reliably good (or evil) -- because my behavior has a lawful cause.
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He could have said "it was like I was disconnected from my body, watching someone else do the things I was doing."
I've heard that plenty of times from people doing wrong and right in a variety of situations - committing a crime, being a victim of crime, serving as a soldier in combat, dealing with an emergency situation.
I saw an interview where the teen stated quite clearly "when it all started it was just like we were playing a video game". Thus, in his mind at least, there was some connection.
Sure, he sees both video games and this murder as an example of him standing over the scene, pulling strings, like it wasn't really happening. What he says implies no causal relationship at all, it was just a convenient analogy.
If he says something further about video games causing his behavior, then we can call him a manipulative bastard. For now we'll just call him a murderer.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Frankly, all of science points to the answer being "yes". In fact there are numerous examples of people becoming downright evil from head trauma.
You're right that crime has a strong genetic component. Nevertheless, it's pointless to characterize these people as "bad": if they are genetically incapable of feeling empathy or remorse, they are no more "bad" than a hungry lion. Furthermore, maladaptive as this behavior may be in our society, it's a normal and important variation in biology; after all, many animal are not social animals and will often fight and kill each other on sight, and it's not surprising that that variation also exists among humans.
Why does it matter whether you call these people "bad" or not? Because the question is whether they should be punished or whether our goal should simply be to protect ourselves from them.
I'm torn on whether we should be curing them, or implementing George Carlin's idea and turning the four corner states into a gigantic prison, and just throw them in there.
I don't think a "cure" is possible. Banishment outside civilized society could be an option, but an expensive one and not a very humane one. Another might be electronic monitoring or control. Whatever we do, we should act to minimize suffering, even their suffering.
Some people have made a career out of shopping around this idea of "anti-social personality disorder". In fact, all this is is a list of poorly defined terms.
There are probably many different causes for people to become "anti-social" or criminal, some genetic, some learned. Pretending that this is a single disorder that can be diagnosed with a checklist is doing a disservice to everybody.
Sorry, I do not live in your fucked-up country. I live in a country which largely follows "my ideals" and which is prospering. If you were honest with yourself, you'd have to try and find a better explanation for your problem than easy scapegoats.
Like, I dunno, extreme social inequalities driving people into crime? A completely ineffective "war on drugs" that is doing nothing to curb the problem, but instead gives more power to criminals and fills up the jails? And so on, and so forth.
No, you're right, let's beat up kids instead, that'll fix it.
Choice and free will aren't even illusory -- the concepts don't even make sense to begin with. And it's ridiculous to suggest that the denial of free will implies that we can't summarily exterminate those who are destructive to the rest of us. It's no different than a pack of rats ganging up on the one rat that goes around biting the rest of them.
You did read the same letter I read, right? The one full of reactionary measures? The one that was so explicit in describing how her and her husband failed completely to take any foresteps of any sort, but instead waited for the kid to screw up and then tried to do something?
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He got himself kicked out of every group he was in... because he did things like beating up disabled children, assault and battery, and general defiance. He damaged other people, constantly. That is not something that can be tolerated. If my child was in an art or drama group and found some asshole kid beating up his classmates, beating up him, disrupting activities, and the like, I'm not going to let my child be in that situation - either he goes or my child does. That is what every rational parent should do.
If you RTFA, you would know that the real trouble was the system's refusal to lock him away from other children and even his own parents because they were socialized to believe that it's never the kid's fault, and that parents are always abusers. They were too lenient, not too restrictive.
Yeah, a kid died. I wonder how much of that has to do with permissive government policies instituted by people with philosophies much like your own.
I feel that nobody in this world is evil at the core.
Then you're scarily mistaken. Antisocial personality disorder has a known biological component. If you lack the biological components for empathy, or if they are twisted out of true, or if your arousal mechanisms are depressed (which is the case with APD) then there is a probability that you will grow up cold, manipulative, and outright evil. APD is a spectrum, with some people having just enough arousal depression to allow them to live a mostly normal life, but engage in risk-taking behaviors (such as mountain climbing or firefighting), while other people from very early childhood take every opportunity to harm others whenever it tickles their sick, twisted little pleasure centers.
This kid is in that latter group. You need to get out of your pie-in-the-sky "It's all nurture" mentality and realize that sometimes evolution hands us a goddamned raw deal, and sometimes that raw deal hurts other people too.
He was constantly in trouble in school, with the cops, with us, with his mother, and with anyone else who was an authority figure. Not a week went by that the school or the cops wouldn't call us for something. His attitude was basically "fuck you, I don't have to listen to you" said with a shrug.
We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested.
They didn't try beating the living shit out of the little prick. Spare the rod...
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One of my friends has a wife who is Chinese and she will complain (if you let her) on how deplorable children are becoming in China because the government has made it easier on them...
I'd argue that where you want to be is in a nation between 'modern' and 'pre-industrial', somewhere in there is the sweet spot for child-parent relations...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Quite possibly there was something wrong with the boy's brain. I don't discount that at all. But I do think it's a cop-out, an easy way to dismiss people as being 'unfixable', when perhaps what we should be questioning is the need to 'fix' them.
Reading the letter, there's something quite noble about this young man's passive resistance to all attempts to control his behaviour through punishment. I'm quite serious, although it doesn't make his violent behaviour any less loathesome. Let's look at the letter again:
"We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested. We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude. When we would ground him, we took away everything. No TV, no computer, no phone, no leaving the house, no snacks or junk food.... Everything. [...] He would just sit there and take it... the groundings had absolutely no affect on him at all. [...] Most kids get grounded or punished a couple of times, and then they want to avoid having to go through it again... not this kid, nothing seemed to phase him."
The first thing I notice here is that she's not thinking in terms of 'stop him beating up other kids'. She's thinking in terms of making him into 'a normal human being'. She's already admitted that she hates him; for her, the person was the problem, not the violent behaviour.
I also note that they weren't simply trying to get him to stop doing wrong. Think about how you'd feel if you were being punished for beating up a disabled kid. Quite reasonable, yes?
Now imagine you're being punished for not wanting to play hockey.
The problem is it's a complete package. He either fights his guardians or works with them. Just as they reject him by trying to turn him into something else, rejecting both the violent behaviour (evil) and the lack of interest in clubs and activities (who cares?), he had to either accept their training or revolt against it. Sure, if he had a strong moral sense of his own (which he obviously didn't - that's what they were supposed to be instilling in him) he could have chosen to stop abusing other people and still resisted their attempts to mold him into the mirror image of his brother. But he would not have been rewarded for it - instead of being punished for beating up disabled kids, he would have been punished for talking back and for 'attitude'. He would have seen no reason to learn to be a moral person - it would not have improved his situation at the time. We know better, but most of us have the advantage of normal, healthy upbringings and a well-developed moral sense.
All of this is conjecture based on the statement of one person who claims to have been there. Yet from her own statement I feel inclined to suspect that the way this boy was treated was abusive, and his rebellion against the abuse also became a rebellion against the rules of simple human decency, because the two were presented to him as being one and the same. Rejecting them both made him into a bully and a murderer.