(no subject)

[geekchick]

That teenager who got in trouble for supposedly writing a story about zombies taking over a high school?

Eh, maybe not so much with the whole undead thing after all.

(link from officialgaiman)

Comments

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

> I also know that being a parent -- especially of teenagers -- is really
> difficult and most people are doing the best they can.

I haven't raised kids but I've known plenty of people who have, including some teenagers, and everything I've heard agrees with what you say.

My childhood seems almost comical now. My parents knew who I was with and generally where we were, essentially all of the time. They also knew how to reach my friends' parents.

I look at it this way: 99.9% of parents are doing well enough that their kids will never do anything noteworthy. It's that very rare exception whose kid kills. I don't know what % of those cases could have been averted by more attentive parents, but that's the only scenario I'd address.

I truly believe that people, below some stage of development, do not understand the consequences of their actions in the way that adults do, in the way that the law usually demands. There is some emerging science to support this, though it's far from settled, and in any case I think societal consensus usually outweighs science. Because of my belief I don't think kids truly understand the consequences of their actions like adults do. One could make the case that kids are all partway to insane, from a legal point of view, in that they don't really appreciate that murder is wrong as adults do. I may be wrong but I do believe this, and as a result I don't think the law should fall as heavily on kids as on adults.

How to draw that line is another challenging question. So far society has muddled through mostly ok there, and it's not like I have any bright ideas.

Even now kids are not fully independent, legally. Parents have some responsibility to, and some special control over, their minor children.

I would probably add another legal responsibility: if your kid kills or seriously harms someone using deadly force, then you might be held responsible. I'm not sure what the penalty would be, but certainly less than if you had done the same deed yourself. The state would have to prove that the parents were negligent in monitoring their kids, compared to what other parents do, and that if they had been more diligent, the harm would most likely have been prevented. If the kid was so stealthy that only unusually intrusive measures would have found what he was doing, or they acted so suddenly that there was no real warning, I'd let the parents off the hook.

I don't know if I'd extend this to lesser crimes. Certainly not initially.

I'd try to avoid attaching any civil liability to this, beyond what now exists. If the DA declined to prosecute, I don't think the parents should have to deal with civil suits too.

Basically I would only want to punish parents who had ample and reasonable opportunity to suspect that something was wrong, and who turned a blind eye. There will always be the stealthy kid who evades the parents. I wouldn't hold those parents responsible. It's hard to make a tradeoff between the privacy of all kids everywhere and the very very few people who will get dead, but who would have lived if the parents had played Big Brother to the hilt. As much as I like to have bright lines I do think this is one for society to work out as a whole, even if there's no clearly articulated principle behind the decision. It sucks to have the very few bad seeds fucking up your privacy, but that's something even we adults have to endure.

I'm not saying that what I'd do is what the government should do. There are some good reasons I don't run anything, one being I'm too willing to make radical changes. But I do think that my problem analyses often have insight, even if my solutions are more questionable.

> It is not so easy as when to call the fire department; the signs of
> trouble are not always obvious.

I hear ya. As long as the parents are truly paying reasonable attention, that's all I ask.