Girls in Slender Man Stabbing Tried as Adults

The Slender Man of urban legend fame.

In 2012, a pair of 12-year old girls stabbed one of their friends, intent on killing her because they thought that if they did so, they would appease the Slender Man. Luckily, the victim escaped and survived the attack.

If you don’t know who Slender Man is, he’s a horror meme, a creature of digital urban legend who was created entirely on the Internet. His fictional nature is well known and well documented, and while he is utterly fascinating from an anthropological or mythological point of view, believing he is real is like believing that Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort are real.

An appeals court in Wisconsin recently upheld the decision to try the girls as adults, despite the wealth of evidence that they were suffering from mental illnesses that caused them to truly believe Slender Man is real and that he would harm their families if they didn’t do what he wanted.

Children are generally tried as children because it is understood that they are not as culpable in their crimes as adults are.

However, Wisconsin and a number of other states have laws that allow children to be tried as adults. Not only that, but some of these laws require children be tried as adults if the crime is considered heinous enough. Essentially, children aren’t culpable unless they do something really awful, at which point they are totally culpable.

The result is that these girls, who were by all accounts too immature and mentally ill to understand the seriousness of their crime, could face up to 65 years in prison when what they really need is mental health care, social services and education.

Locking them away isn’t going to rehabilitate them. Incarceration will simply remove them from society for so long that they will never have the chance to be productive members of society.