It sounds fictional. Two 12-year-old girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, lured their friend out into the woods one Saturday evening and stabbed her 19 times in homage to a dark figure they allegedly revere.

Sends chills down the spine, doesn’t it? Though I would very much like to claim this as a ghost story passed between small children, I can’t. This was an actual event that occurred on May 31. 

It’s not totally tragic. The victim survived, after she dragged her bloodied body through the woods all night to the side of the road. The next morning, a bicyclist found her, half-dead. Geyser and Weier were apprehended shortly after and now await trial.

The dark figure the girls said they follow is a fictitious Internet meme known as Slender Man — a tall, lanky, faceless man dressed in a business suit who wanders around the woods at night killing lost children. 

But images of Slender Man tossed around by the media point fingers in the wrong direction. Several news outlets claim the Internet is to blame or that the culture surrounding the girls led them to commit the crime.

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote on the issue, “[Ours] is a culture that takes fantasy symbols of evil — the vampire, the witch — and transforms them into heroes of great virtue. It is a culture where dark magic is celebrated, but religion is considered bothersome. We reap what we sow.”

The girls reportedly received instructions to kill their victim from shady online sources. If they carried out the deed, they would be worthy enough to become Slender Man’s followers and live in his mansion.

The Internet and popular culture shouldn’t be blamed for containing such dark material. Unrestricted Internet access and the people who allowed this are the real culprits. 

Those who unknowingly let the girls access material such as this should bear the brunt of the blame. Young, vivid imaginations cannot distinguish between the fact and fiction found in media and online. It’s easy for a child to think he or she is serving a dark deity after viewing some questionable online webpages.

For the girls, it seems the worlds of reality and myth were blurred by technology and their imaginations. Who is in a position to monitor the children and raise questions about the alarming material they access online? Their parents.

It is bad parenting to allow a 12-year-old to run rampant on the Internet without supervision. The amount of darkness and depravity located on the web and its relative ease of access as evidenced by this tragedy, should be common knowledge. 

The stabbing was not a spur of the moment occurrence. The girls had planned to stab their friend since February. The parents didn’t notice anything troubling about their daughters, indicating parental detachment and indifference.

I’m not saying parents need to sit down with their child and have the “stabbing talk.” Instead, a more proactive and invested role in the child’s life could avoid great tragedies. If the parents played a significant role in their childrens’ lives, they would have noticed some troubling things and subsequently acted on them.  

The large discussion pertaining to the girls and whether they should be tried as adults misses the main point. While I recognize that not all the facts are out yet, I believe the parents should be thrown into the mix for negligence.

We are all products of our upbringing. How we are raised determines largely how we act today. Though not all the details about the girls’ home lives are out yet, it blows my mind that the parenting in this situation has not been discussed. 

While people will argue nature versus nurture and question which is more important in this case, nurture definitely played a big role in this tragedy and needs to be addressed.

Write to Brian at [email protected]