By Muriel Sluyter

Our Aug. 22 newspaper says the murder of a three-year-old by two little girls remains an enigma. That’s not true, unless we are slow learners.

The AP story doesn’t say much about the girls’ families, but it give important clues. The state left the siblings of the murdered child, including the sister who helped kill him, with their mother, but the children of the other family were placed in state custody. The murdered child’s family seems typical of today’s fractured, messed up families, but the other family must have been even worse.

Let’s interject one fact at this point: If these girls had used a gun, the headlines who have placed the blame on the gun and, by extrapolation, on the gun’s manufacturers and the stories would have been filled with demands for gun control.

Doctor Ken. Magid of Golden, Colo. , wrote a book, High Risk: Children Without a Conscience, about children who commit murder and other hideous crimes. He says, "We look at adults and children who kill — they personify an attachment process that has gone very wrong...Wherever these people go, a wake of misery and fear usually follows, Unknowingly we may be creating a society in which more and more people without conscience will victimize the innocent. The deviants run the gamut, from child molesters, to abusers...to murderers.

"The popular press frequently reports the results of ‘scientific studies’ without hiring a statistician to check the accuracy of the statistics...We found this to be the case, for example, during our investigation of day-care centers and how they affect infants and children...We found (several) magazine articles with...scientific research that had ‘proven’ mothers and father can leave their infants in day care with no adverse effects. Expert after expert agreed there was nothing to worry about. The bottom line is that results could not be replicated...nor relied upon as scientifically sound."

Magid gives a long list of examples of children who have murdered, including: "Girl, 4, kills twin baby brothers by throwing them to the floor after one of the three-week-old infants accidentally scratches her during play;

"Florida police try to determine if 5-year-old knew consequences when he threw 3-year-old off fifth-floor stairwell."

In 1987, Danny Dawson, chief of the Orange-Osceola County State Attorney’s juvenile division said, "Ten years ago, it was a shock to see a 7- 8- or 9-year-old come into the system, now it’s not...It is a trend...You still think of them as children. But I don’t think (the public has) seen what we’ve seen. They don’t see the 7-year-old who has a criminal mind and has the street savvy of a 16-year-old."

Magid says, "...experts from around the country are compiling evidence that..behavior of children that erupts in murder is rooted in family relationships gone awry...The (bonding) breaks that cause unattachment — domestic violence, divorce, parental mismanagement — are often to blame."

Using Dawson’s dates, there were few murderous children in 1977. What changed? Mothers were told to leave their children and return to work; to remain at home would be irresponsible and unproductive; families have disintegrated; illegitimate births have skyrocketed; fathers have been displaced in our venomously feminist society; divorce has created multiple millions of single-parent homes; children have been devalued and damaged by the daily, hours-long absence of a loving, attentive mother.