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Our murderer had spent his childhood among men and women, and whatever else the rest of us could suppose about the women involved in those experiences, our theories would never amount to more than a badly flawed set of assumptions. It would be up to Sara to provide us with a different perspective, to create for us a woman (or series of women) who might have helped foster such rage. We could not succeed without that.
American society did not then generally recognize (as much of it still does not) that children might not be fully responsible for their own actions and decisions: childhood has never been viewed by most Americans as a separate and special stage of growth, fundamentally different from adulthood and subject to its own rules and laws.
“You’re about to suggest that we’re born with specific a priori concepts of need and desire—an understandable thought, perhaps, were there any evidence to support it.
There was nothing, however, for me to do about that: such boys were their own men.
Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.
