June 03, 2004
Ban the Internet
"She wrote something bad about my appearance several times on the Net a few days before the incident. I didn't like that, so I called her (to a study room) and slashed her neck after getting her to sit on a chair," the Yomiuri Shimbun quoted Mitarai's killer, 11, as telling police sources.My God! No one told me this was so dangerous.
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I think the title you gave it is interesting - clearly some will take this as another sign that the Internet is an evil place and causes badness in the youth (whatever a Media Studies professor says). However, it's interesting that she got the idea for her MO from TV, and that she was influenced by books, but it's the Internet factor that they focus in on.
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What nicola said. And also, she was 11, reading and watching that crap and her parents didn't care? The authorities' sense of cause and affect is interesting.
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I dunno... Has anyone actually attempted to blame the internet yet? I'm going to save my virulent defence till someone does.
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This seems like a pretty clear case of a child with a severe pathology. This level of violence isn't derivative of causal causation ( like books or the web). Even her "statements" seem to indicate that she has some disassociative issues. I know that there are translation issues at work here, but it seems like she's sorry because she is supposed to be sorry, not because she feels actual remorse. /BA in psychology
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I was about to attempt to correct you on something but then I read your last remark and kept my big gob shut.
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not that the us is perfect, but... seriously, there's some f**ked up shit going on in japan, what with the pressure to conform and the whole school system and all. lots more teenage suicides than in the us, too. our way is better. less pressure, less suicides. would be perfect, except there's a downside - half the schools don't get enough money to actually teach the kids anything, and our kids suck at any test designed to measure student performance vs. the rest of the world...
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I'm not sure our way is "better", froggy; our way is simply more "us"-- and you aptly note that the downside seeps in to so many other parts of daily life (kids without bright futures are turning to crime, or are oppressed by anti-union modern-day dead-end jobs/sweatshops, or tend to engage in risky sexual behaviors, etc...) Japanese and other Eastern cultures do so many things well; education is searingly rigorous but hath its benefits, but most importantly no one seems to be making the case that her schooling is responsible for her aberrant behavior. There ARE monsters. Most have a cause, some don't.
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from the "us", then (if "us" can mean Anglo too): a teenager in Manchester posing on-line as MI5 convinced another teen to kill him. Yes, this is a bizarre suicide attempt, not murdering a classmate, but surely just as fucked up? [my apologies if this has already been throughly debated around here]