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A few weeks ago I got about 60% of the way through writing an effort post on "some people I have known," and it just got too long and convoluted... but this seems like a place to tell one of those stories.
I have some neighbors with a 12 year old daughter and a couple younger sons. Beginning when the daughter was 4 or 5, she would leave the house and come knock on neighbor's doors (including mine)--when the door was opened, she would walk right in and ask for something to eat, or invite adults to come play with her, or start rummaging through people's belongings. Sometimes she would ask if she could live with them. Refusal was met with pouting, bargaining, and sometimes screaming fits. Some neighbors would call the mother, some would call the police, depending on their level of integration into the neighborhood community; you would not guess from looking at this girl, or speaking with her, that she has any particular mental disability or whatever. Within a couple of months (during which time they made various attempts at education and discipline and other behavior-modification) my neighbors installed deadbolts on all exterior doors that had to be unlocked with a key from either side. Apparently nothing short of literally locking their daughter into the house could prevent this behavior.
This became particularly apparent when they sent her to school, as she would simply leave school any time something happened to upset her--and then resume knocking on the doors of houses that appealed to her. She was placed into one of those "special" classrooms for discipline cases and slow learners. Within a few years she had received an official diagnosis of "oppositional defiant disorder" with a side of "level one autism spectrum disorder." She made some friends and things seemed to be progressing in a good direction.
When the girl was 9 or 10, inspired in part by the girl's progress and by the growth of their younger sons (who were also generally "locked in" as collateral damage, and who wanted the freedom to play outside without being let outside, or let back in), the family removed the key-only deadbolts. Within a year or so (by now the girl was 11), early one morning, the girl let herself out and took a walk. She left our neighborhood; I don't know how far she walked, but she knocked on a stranger's door and asked to live with them, because her parents were sexually abusing her.
Naturally, these people called the cops. What happened next my neighbor would relate to me later--would relate to most of our neighbors, later, as he canvassed the neighborhood sharing information in hopes of preventing another such incident. From his perspective, the story went like this: after realizing his daughter was gone (maybe half an hour after the daughter had slipped away), he called the parents of a couple of her friends. When none of them knew of her location, he took a short walk around the block, looking for her. Finally, he called the police, who informed him that they had his daughter in custody and would be by the house shortly.
When the police arrived, they left his daughter in the cruiser. They arrived with a social worker. They separated him from his wife and interviewed each of them individually, during which time they asked a series of increasingly upsetting questions. Eventually it was revealed to them that their daughter had given an exceedingly graphic description of violent sexual abuse, which she reported she had suffered at the (joint!) hands of her parents. His wife produced documentation from the girl's psychologist, emails from school administrators and teachers, and contact information for neighbors who could corroborate certain events. The authorities glanced over all of this without much comment.
My neighbor said he couldn't imagine how his daughter had even learned about some of the things she'd accused him of (their internet is pretty locked down, and his daughter does not have a cell phone), but he's pretty sure it was just information gleaned from her "friends" (and their smartphones) in the discipline-case classroom. Despite grilling him to a distressing degree, he says the cops didn't find his daughter's story very credible--but as a matter of policy, child abuse allegations are of course taken very seriously even when they are clearly fantastical. When the grilling was done, they brought the daughter into the house--screaming all the while that she hated her family and was in mortal danger--told the parents "good luck" and beat a hasty retreat.
As soon as the cops were gone, the daughter stopped screaming, assumed a totally flat affect, and asked for something to eat. Her parents explained to her that she had put them and her brothers in quite serious danger, and the daughter responded that she didn't intend for anyone to get hurt, but she wished she had a family that was more "fun," and that was all she was trying to accomplish.
That is in broad strokes the story my neighbor told me, stoically, as he provided me with a color printout of his daughter's face on a list of contact information--not just his and his wife's, but also her psychologist, her school resource officer, some nearby family members. He apologized for the imposition but asked me to please call whoever I felt most comfortable calling, if his daughter ever showed up at my door or even if I just saw her wandering around unattended.
I've known children prone to fits and outbursts, prone to theft and prevarication, prone even to inexplicable physical violence. But this particular girl strikes me as exactly the kind of straight-up "psychopath" that academic psychologists have been reluctant to recognize as such. If her parents hadn't been meticulously documenting this girl's behavior for years, would they still have custody of their children? Might one or both of them be in prison, right now? And looking forward to her teenage years, assuming she continues to harbor this peculiar impulse to get away from her family, what actions might she take? At the extreme end, maybe she just kills her parents, but in lesser tragedies she might run further away than the next neighborhood over; she might very easily be lured into running away with a predator; at best I suspect she will continue to internalize the negative influences of her discipline-case peers and fall into drug use or theft or other anti-social behaviors. She's not mentally disabled; with daily supervision she could probably live a normal-ish life, but only if she could be persuaded to accept such supervision in the long term, and only if someone is willing and able to provide that supervision. Today, that's her parents, but even if she remains with them well into adulthood, she should outlive them by decades.
Cases like this are not common, I think, but similar situations ("on the same spectrum" we might say) are common enough that they capture something really challenging about living in a society. Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised. Some of the worst off do get such supervision; if they aren't born into attentive families, group homes and halfway houses and the like also exist. But in our relentless pursuit of dignity and autonomy and equality for all, we have made it all but politically impossible to act on the idea that a meaningful percentage of our population would genuinely be much better off if their lives were managed by someone else. Because the difficult question is always--who?
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
Fucking hell.
This isn't even the full story. The full version includes possible sexual assault, possible lying about sexual assault, minor physical violence, inappropriate emotional outbursts, more cheating, more erratic behaviour, and more crazy dating experiences.
I will let my comment be: I'm glad you got yourself away from this person. Hopefully no lasting damage to you.
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Reminds me of The Mask of Sanity.
If the parents are smart, they will evict the daughter the second she turns 18, never speak to her again, and focus their resources on the remaining sons. But most parents are not that smart.
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I don't think the girl in question was low information, low intellect and definitely not low agentic. She just seemed fixated on causing chaos, and did everything in her power to do what was "fun" to her.
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Frankly if you don't know a couple different animals wearing human skin that should be put down, you probably don't know enough about people.
Who can really solve this problem? Many of these psychopaths figure out ways to fit in the crevices of society where the state can't or won't get to them. Ticking time bombs.
I'm all for giving kids a fair shake, but once you get into the double digits IMO I haven't seen a freak like this change their stripes.
Many people would call people like you, who call for other human beings to be murdered because you perceive them as animals, a psychopath, or someone with anti-social tendencies at the very least.
So what are you saying here? That there are no such thing as psychopaths? There's never been a human with an outsize negative effect on society? Your moralizing tone doesn't make you any more convincing.
I'm a borderline pacifist that abhors violence. But if you disagree with my assertion you are either a teenager with too little life experience or willfully ignorant.
I am not saying either. Ofcourse there are people who have been a net negative to society throughout their lives. It's good to know that you abhor violence, but your initial statement didn't come across that way. I am saying that even the people who are a net negative to society and are psychopaths are still human (not animals) and don't deserve to be murdered ("put down"). I believe it is immoral to kill people except as a last resort (for self-defense). There are many other things we could do with these people instead of killing them that will still make society safer.
In my (admittedly most extreme) example we're literally talking about people who start by murdering, raping, and robbing other people their whole lives.
Then they have more children, addled by drugs from birth and neglect from the jump. Who kick things off by consuming vast quantities of resources from families that adopt them. The exact same problems, but geometrically multiplied for each generation. And they're fast too, because getting knocked up the first at 16 means more meth quicker.
These are rare examples, yes. Fractions of a percent. But to repeat: it's not a morally superior stance to look at the rivers of blood and treasure consumed by tiny fractions of society, then to just throw up your hands and say "oops, guess we can't fix it!". It's the absolute worst version of the tragedy of the commons.
I agree that the right approach is not to ignore the problem because it is hard, but I don't believe that the only thing we can do to solve it is murder these people.
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Like what? I’m trying to imagine some institutional entity set up to try and maximize the productive labor value of people like this girl; such an entity would need to devote a very onerous amount of money, time, and resources just to making sure she doesn’t fuck something up massively. This is money spent just to make sure she isn’t a huge net negative; that’s long before we’ve gotten anywhere near turning her into a net positive. We also need to make sure such an entity does not give her access to anything important with which she could channel her obvious devotion to cause into a genuinely destructive action.
So, what sort of menial, non-impactful tasks are we setting her to, such that if she decides to do something horrible she can’t have much impact, but she still has the capacity to represent an economic (or even social) net positive, after taking into account everything required to keep her from doing something horrible?
Feature, not a bug. Plus, all the boys and men whose lives are graced by her presence should Have Some Empathy and take her accusations on the chin like a Real Man (where each accusation needs to be thoroughly investigated by The Authorities).
It reminds me of a Reddit thread about a female illegal immigrant committing a DUI homicide (no, not the jetski incident, a different female illegal immigrant homicide while operating a motor vehicle likely under the influence).
The perpetrator was sentenced to multiple years in prison, and a Redditor bemoaned that we don’t treat Persons of Justice Involvement (especially those of Color) with enough Compassion, and it would be better for Society to give her a second chance instead of ruining two lives over a little DUI whoopsie while waiting for her citizenship documentation. A wrongthinker replied that it is awfully coincidental that what’s promoted as good for society always sounds suspiciously similar to what would be good for the criminal(s) under discussion.
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We don't have to necessarily try and maximize the productive labor value of such people. Even locking them up in prison and giving them the necessities to live is better than killing them. Many people with dysfunctional lives have mental illnesses that can be treated, or they can be institutionalized. There are constraints on how many resources can be spent on fixing such people right now because we live in a resource-constrained society. This is becoming less of an issue as we grow wealthier and technology advances though, and eventually I believe we will be able to give everyone what they need due to AI. I think the main reason we don't see a lot of change in mentally ill and psychopathic people is because we don't spend a lot of resources to identify the origin of their issues in detail and give appropriately personalized treatment to fix them in the first place (understandably so, but that doesn't mean that nothing can be done to fix them). I will also note that most psychopaths grow up into productive people because they are intelligent enough to understand the incentive systems created by society.
I think a huge cause of the issue with the girl in question is also that she is a child. I don't claim to understand her mindset fully, but she doesn't seem to want to be purposefully causing harm to people around her. I think her actions would be a lot more destructive if that were the case. I think it is possible that this particular girl will stop trying to do things such as break into other people's house for fun when she becomes older, has more responsibilities and her actions have consequences that directly impact her life. As of now, her actions don't have that many consequences. She gets to live in a decently wealthy house with attentive parents and have all her needs met without having to work for them. Punishments like grounding aren't really negative if you don't care about them much. She would probably also stop it now if she was in a harsher incentive system. I don't think she would behave in the same manner if she had to work to get money for her necessities like food and clothing, she couldn't steal and would be placed in jail like adults if she did anything illegal or harassed people, and had more things to worry about just like adults. We don't do that because it is considered child abuse, but I wouldn't say that we have explored all the options just because her parents take her to counselling, try to make her understand the consequences of her actions, and institute disciplinary measures that don't affect her very much.
But she didn't. She is intelligent enough to understand those incentive systems created by society to purposefully cause harm to others.
Her actions were already seriously destructive. Tantamount to attempted murder, in fact. Preventing it already required her to be locked up, and that has already put the rest of the family in danger.
She really isn't (Western fiction about the age of adulthood aside); note that your suggested solution is to treat her like the adult she clearly is. Mine is too, of course- adults attempting murder get adult punishments (including and up to physical removal), and that's OK. The British hanging tables have data matching youth body types for a reason.
Which action of her would you say is tantamount to attempted murder?
I agree that she doesn't care about the harm being caused to others (like her parents and siblings, but also the people whose house she breaks into) in this case, but I think that is more due to apathy rather than finding it fun to harm others specifically. When I said I think her actions would have been a lot more destructive, I mean that would have included consistent violence, property destruction, emotional abuse, and other things that are more severe.
11 is still a child in my opinion. That's the oldest age given above, unless I missed something. I don't think I had the maturity I do now at 11, and I think that is true of a lot of people. You grow up a lot partly due to increased responsibility you are given by others. I wouldn't say that she should get adult punishments yet, there are a lot more stricter options between adult punishment and her current life that have not been tried at all. And unless juvenile prison is different in her country than mine, even that would be a much harsher life than she is living currently (though she wouldn't have much responsibility there either - you get your basic necessities brought to you and you can't do anything to improve the quality of life you are given, so the incentive system doesn't incentivize good behavior and she will still be as rebellious as possible thus it wouldn't be a good solution, but still better than "putting her down").
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Not trying to beat you up with responses here, but I both:
You want to be fair to this child. I want to be fair to everyone else.
I meant that she is a child more to point out that her current way of living and incentive system is very different than from an adult's and also that she doesn't have the capacity she would have as an adult, rather than to elicit empathy. Empathy is also a good to have, but I do think that her specific problem of getting bored and seeking chaos for fun would be less likely to occur if she had a lot of responsibilities to worry about in her day to day life and also had a lot more control over her life (so if she wants something, then she can figure out how to get it for herself rather than begging the people around her, and it would probably be in a productive manner in a well-structured society). She would also have learned mechanisms to deal with things that cause her to be upset with more experience in life (even if they aren't the most healthy or ideal way). Currently, she has only learned to devolve into tantrums and escape whatever irritates her because that is what works now. I also have heard of people who didn't have empathy for others the way she doesn't have any now when they were teenagers, but went on to learn it. So even if it is unlikely, I don't think that it is impossible she would always stay this way.
I am not convinced that children with this very specific/rare combination of traits go on to be great destroyers 100% of the time. Can you link a source if you have any, or are you speaking from your own experience? Personally, I have read that most psychopaths tend to become productive members of society, and it makes sense to me why that would be. Also, I am curious what kind of behaviour you are expecting from the girl in the future. I can see her becoming a druggie in a society that allows drugs, and a thief in one that is lenient with thiefs, but in both cases I would blame the system too. Apart from that I can see her being anti-social in situations where she has nothing to gain from, but that's not considered destructive enough to murder people.
I agree that it doesn't make sense to prioritise this girl over everyone else, but I don't think that it has to be a tradeoff. Surely there are solutions between just letting the problem be, and "putting her down" that work out for everyone.
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