What The Hell is Wrong with these Kids????

...Aaaaaand again with the gross slander of Jenny because, being a real person-- young, not particularly clever, disabled, and extremely vulnerable-- in a real situation, she, er, lacked the fantasy bravery of a keyboard warrior.

Okay, here's another "just for the record" for you: Jenny most definitely did try to tell some of the adults in her life what was happening. And just as with the two neighbor kids who were witnesses and minor participants, once again, the adults dropped the ball.

You're asking the wrong question. It should be "what the hell was wrong with so many of those adults?"

Just for starters: What the hell was wrong with the social worker? The minister? Jenny and Sylvia's older sister? Why did no truant officer visit when Sylvia started missing school? What was wrong with Mrs. Vermilion?

"I don't deduce, I observe."

Was the millgram experiment the one that featured 'electrocution' or was it the one involving prisoners where they had to stop it after 2 days?
You make a good point, though: people behave strangely even when they are aware that they are taking part in an experiment, let alone teenagers in a 'hot-house' environment. I'm not excusing their behaviour in any way but 'for evil to prevail, it takes good men to do nothing'.

The Stanford Experiment was the one involving 'guards and prisoners' I knew it would come back to me!

Germany 1933 - 1945 carried out thousands of spiteful acts on fellow citizens. Or look at the Japanese and their treament of British POWs. But those kids in An American Crime, jeesh... Makes me wonder how many twisted kids are torturing others right now and just haven't been caught yet. We've had several cases in the UK of teenagers mugging, then murdering a victim at random, while filming the acts of depravity on their mobile phones. Or look at the Bulger case. This type of psycho behaviour isn't learned, in my view. It's gotta be genetically inspired.

Well said!

"A Child Called 'It'" was autobiographical; it wasn't written by the brother but by the boy himself.

Another thing to add, though, is that "mob mentality" plays a huge role in this. It's very likely that not one of those kids (within the home or the neighborhood ones) would've treated Sylvia that way on their own as individuals. But unfortunately when you put people together, in small numbers or large, they're more likely to go with the crowd, so to speak, and that seems to be what happened here, as horrifying as it is.