Another headline, another senseless tragedy. During a week full of them, this one hardly caused a blip on my radar, except that it happened here. First I read that a group of teens forced a boy to watch his mother repeatedly raped, then have sex with her himself at gunpoint. An 11-yr.-old girl took the car during her family’s vacation, got drunk and raced away from police, crashing and getting arrested for DUI.
Here in St. Louis, a 12-yr.old boy stabbed and killed a 13-yr.-old girl. The crime is getting much local press, first because the family allegedly called the police more than once earlier in the day about the boy causing trouble. Second, because the court is considering trying the boy as an adult.
My first thought was, “Good, the little bastard will get what he deserves.”
This evening, though, when I again saw the headline flash across my computer screen, the absurdity of that potential decision caught in my throat and gave me chills.
I have a 12-yr.-old child. An adult?? No way. A child, a tween. A partially-formed adult, but not whole, not yet.
A kid. Not one growing up in poverty in the middle of the drug-and-gun culture like this boy, but one loved and nurtured who attends a great school where strong emphasis is placed on interpersonal skills and intrapersonal knowledge. She is smart and funny and beautiful and charismatic – and moody and short-tempered and whiny. She can cut short an articulate explanation of why kids should be allowed to vote to screech at her little sister for daring to touch HER bottle of neon green nail polish even though she left it in the middle of the floor and said sister is merely putting it on the table.
She knows how to make good decisions . . . and still can’t always stop herself from making bad ones. Because she is a child. Because her brain is not fully developed, her self-control not yet in place and her life experience is, let’s face it, not enough yet.
Sometimes when I am feeling frustrated with her, when no amount of calm logic seems able to cut through her irrational moods, I have to consciously remind myself that she is NOT a small adult. She can generate pearls of wisdom, flashes of brilliant depth in her thinking and has a larger vocabulary than many adults I know. She thinks she’s as smart and mature as an adult, and sometimes even I am fooled – but she is still a child. And were I to forget that, I’d be a pretty ineffective parent.
Even with all the skills she has and all the love and support in her life, she cannot function as an adult. She makes mistakes that most adults would not, because, as I believe I mentioned, she is a still child.
Now, I am in no way saying that her mistakes come anywhere close to murder. She has never erred in any kind of violent way. Well, not THAT kind of violent. I can’t compare my daughter and this boy in any significant way other than their ages. Some might even say this boy is closer to adulthood than she, simply by virtue of street smarts. He’s from the “mean streets,” forced to grow up too fast by experiences no child should have to endure. I would argue that those experiences are precisely why he is incapable of thinking and acting like an adult. He very likely missed out on the kind of childhood best suited to sane adulthood. Role models? Decent education? Unconditional love? Doubtful he’s had much of any of that.
The 12-yr.-olds I know, full of budding maturity and brilliant flashes of insight and the raw material of incredible adults – they’ve all had those important pieces of childhood. And still, they are not ready to be tossed into the world of adults.
To try this boy as an adult would be wrong, utter insanity. To try him as adult, with the goal of the prosecution to see his life spent in prison, would be to brand him hopeless before he even hits his teens. We the people would be saying that who he is at 12 is it, the final version, a fully developed human being completely culpable for all of his actions, fully cognizant of all consequences. Did he know that stabbing someone was dangerous, potentially lethal? Of course he did. Did he purposefully take this action? Apparently so. Was it wrong? Well, certainly it was – horribly, tragically, senselessly wrong.
Should he be held accountable for his actions? Absolutely. Does he have a very long and difficult road ahead of him? Without question. Are the chances of him turning his life around good? No, probably not. Doubtful even. But is it possible? Should we give up on him already? Is he really ready to be held as accountable for his actions as a full-grown adult?
No. I say he absolutely is not. He obviously needs help, is a troubled and dangerous soul. But no matter what, he is only 12. He is a child. Someone, somewhere – a parent???? – must shoulder some of the blame for this child’s misguided behavior, irrational anger and inability to solve problems without violence. I’m not suggesting that his family be put on trial, but I’d hate to see any child tossed out into the harshest of adult worlds and never given the chance to redeem himself.
I’ve learned, as the parent of two tweens, that they see the world in black and white – good and bad, right and wrong – and have yet to develop the skills to see nuance, to understand gray areas. My daughter and her friends are utterly appalled that ANYONE would be so stupid as to smoke or take drugs. They are bad, period. Yet I know that within a few short years, some of that group will be have started smoking and some will have experimented with drugs or sex. They will get lost in the gray area, the fiction of their own invincibility, the confusion of the world as their firmly held childhood beliefs are questioned and turned upside down. As they mature, their brains will expand through a last giant growth spurt, more powerful even than the growth spurt of toddlerhood when we watched them learn at an exponentially fast rate. And when they come out on the other side, they will reach adulthood, still young, still naive, but ready to be held fully accountable for all of their actions.
If we begin trying 12-yr.-olds, ANY 12-yr.-olds, as adults, the ramifications of that thinking will be grave. Just because children of the new millennium are crammed full of information and expected to regurgitate more facts than any past generation, and just because they are exposed to more “mature content” than anyone growing up before them – none of that means that they are no longer children, that their brains don’t still have much growing to do.
This boy needs to be held accountable – as a child. He needs intense intervention, therapy and help. Can you even imagine what would happen to a young thing like him, were he to be tried as an adult and tossed into prison? I can’t.
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