This seems a little… excessive:
Advocates for an 11-year-old girl who was arrested on a deadly weapon charge for throwing a 2-pound rock during a water balloon fight say the charge in no way fits the crime.
But Fresno’s mayor and police chief say Maribel Cuevas’s case was handled appropriately, and that assault with a deadly weapon is the proper charge for an act that might have had fatal consequences.
I’m relieved to see she’s actually being tried as a juvenile.
This kind of thing gives me some cognitive dissonance, though. Most of the time, my vivid memories of life as a child lead me to have sympathy for the way that children see the world, or at least the way that children who thought as I did see the world.
I have memories of being a child, set upon by various bullies, and wishing that someone would take seriously other children’s threats of violence: "If we were working together in an office, instead of being kids at school, I could sue that girl for assault." It was miserably wounding to know that the frightening prospect of being punched or even humiliated by some powerful other kid would be dismissed as kid stuff by all the adults who were supposed to protect us. Maybe what was wounding about it was the whole idea that "kid stuff" was, at heart, dismissible.
And here it is, what I wished for as a child, coming to pass: A child placed under house arrest, made to wear monitoring bracelets, facing the prospect of four years’ incarceration because she threw a rock. A big rock; indeed, she could have injured him badly. And it’s taken seriously by everyone involved: no kids’ scuffle, this is a felony assault. Just what I would have wanted. So why does this bother me so?
Maybe because the other kid started it, at least according to the news reports. He pelted her with water balloons and taunted her first. She fought back.
Yeah, water balloons—that’s the "kid stuff." She fought back with a rock. That’s the "serious stuff."
But: Does a humiliated, furious eleven-year-old have the kind of control of the will to stop, to calculate whether throwing a rock is a disproportionate response to being taunted and hit with a water balloon? I suppose that is one of the questions that the juvenile court will weigh. I hope so. Another thing I remember about childhood is that the sense of proportion is very, very different from the one we develop as adults. Part of that is because children, out of our programming as human children, value connections, welcoming, and inclusion—the opposite of humiliation—more than almost anything else. Humiliation is indeed worse, for a child, than common physical injury.
The boy she struck, Elijah Vang, supposedly taunted her and soaked her with water balloons. Nothing physically wounding, of course. Kid stuff. But do you think: those weren’t fighting words? You want to tell me: that wasn’t incitement? Is it fair to put Maribel’s stone-throwing in an adult context, and not Elijah’s?
I can’t help but think that Maribel is being punished not for simple assault, but for fighting back.
Never, never, never fight back: the zero-tolerance mantra.
Feministblogs agrees.
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