Slender Man Is The Easy Target To Blame For Gruesome Wisconsin Stabbing
Slender Man and other horror based internet memes and characters are at the forefront of parent’s minds this week. The attempted murder stabbing of a 12 year old girl in Milwaukee is horrifying, especially when you consider the crime was allegedly committed by girls around her age. The girls who are accused of the stabbing said their motive for the attempted murder was to gain notoriety in the online community based on the fictional Slender Man.
But what is the parent’s role in this situation? The Slender Man community did not tell these girls to commit attempted murder, at least nothing eluding to that can be found thus far. Could it be that these girls simply should not have been on this website, should not have had access to Slender Man?
Allow me to sound old for a moment. When I was younger, say 12 years old, I was not allowed to watch horror movies like “Nightmare On Elm Street” or “Friday The 13th.” It wasn’t because my parents were afraid I was going to go on a shooting or stabbing rampage, it was because they wanted to protect my dreams at night.
Granted, the internet is much tougher for parents to control. However, parents have to do all they can to ensure that their children are viewing and participating in age appropriate activities on the internet. Of course, age appropriateness coincides with the maturity of the individual child.
The internet is both the best and worst creation in recent history and parents should respect that. It may be a tough thing for parents to do, but talk to your child, ask them what it is they do online. If they’re into Slender Man or other scary sites, investigate!
Censoring Slender Man is not the answer to preventing violence by impressionable youngsters. Kids will just move on to the next thing, and Slender Man is not the only horror character online. It is also virtually impossible for website creators to completely weed out underage users.
In most cases, the only age verification a website has is a birth date input and a CAPTCHA and that’s more to protect the website and not the user. The website that these girls belonged to, Creepypasta, bars anyone under the age of 13 in their rules, and clearly states that all stories shared are fictional. Creepypasta is just one of the many Slender Man based websites, and Slender Man creators cannot do much more than that.
This case is clearly more about the girls’ parents being involved in their internet activity, and less about a website based on a violent character, Slender Man, influencing young people to conduct heinous acts.
