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Q: So any 6-year-old, even the most violent 6-year-old can be treated?

Hyman: There's no doubt in my mind that we can effectively influence the life of any 6-year-old. The most violent 6-year-old included. And to desist from this, to reject that challenge, to turn away from that child is, I believe, very, very abusive.

Q: How long and expensive is the treatment for such a 6-year-old, and should we spend the money?

Hyman: Some people ask--when we look at a 6-year-old involved in egregious behavior, whether it's violent crime or some other very, very seriously disordered behavior--whether we should spend the money. How long are we going to have to be treating this person? What kind of involvement will it require? What kind of a commitment do we have to make? I think the answer is simple. That if we write off a 6-year-old, we might as well write off society. 6-year-olds are very, very malleable. Not all legally malleable, not all legally endowed, some of them with significant deficiencies and impairments. But one thing that we know in working with real people as clinicians is that people have strengths and weaknesses. And we can build on those strengths and we can minimize those weaknesses. That's true with any person and it's certainly true with a 6-year-old.

Q: Are offenders are getting younger and younger? And how are we to deal with that?

Hyman: When we see a case like this, with a 6-year-old who is charged with such serious crimes, obviously it can readily feed into society's fears that we've got a society in which major crime is becoming more and more typical of children of younger and younger ages. We have certainly had, in recent years, a problem with youthful participation in serious crime. And yet when we look at the data, we find that the trend is now going in the opposite direction, that it decreases. So if we isolate any particular case, whether it's one of violent crime, or any other factor that we look at, and try to generalize it inappropriately, we can certainly go in a wrong direction. And we have to be very, very careful in cases like this, which are not typical of anything, of generalizing them inappropriately.

Q: So this isn't a typical case by any stretch of the imagination.

Hyman: This case is certainly not a typical case by any stretch of the imagination. I've been involved in forensic practice for a quarter of a century. I've been involved in clinical practice for a bit longer than that. I've never seen a case like this, and I don't believe anyone else has. I've seen horrible cases, I've seen horrible cases with children, but this is a very unusual one. It's one that we can learn lessons from. It's one that can elucidate some of the lessons that we've learned in other contexts. But it's also one from which we have to be very, very careful in approaching it very gingerly in making any generality. Because it's a very unusual situation.

Q: And what lessons should we learn from this case?

Hyman: One of the lessons that I've learned from this case is that we can have a perpetrator of crime who's also a victim ...

Q: What do you mean by victim?

Hyman: I've virtually never seen a child commit a serious crime who is not himself or herself the victim of one of a variety of factors or all: poor parenting, societal factors, such as broad patterns of unemployment. Certainly the broad social elements that have disrupted the family have contributed to the emergence youthful crime. And probably contributed most directly to the persistence of crime in the adult years. So there are a myriad of factors that pertain.

Q: Do you think in general, cases of 6-year-old children belong in the criminal justice system?

Hyman: There's a real question in my mind. Not in terms of soft humane factors, but rather just in terms of what developmental studies tell us about children, whether a 6-year-old should even be involved at any level in the juvenile justice system. Certainly, as a court's expert, this question will not influence my assessment of any 6-year-old. And yet any expert trained in the behavioral and social sciences doing such an assessment of competency of a 6-year-old would have to look at developmental research, and what we know about human development. And we certainly know that many of the questions posed to a child at that age are simply ones that can't be answered.

In this particular case, to elucidate that, I turned to a gifted 6-year-old and asked him what might happen to him if he had done something very, very wrong. And he asked me "What?" And I said, "Well, something very, very wrong." He said, "You mean like killing somebody?" And I said, "Yes." And he turned to me and he said, "I'd have to go to the principal's office for a really long time."

On the one hand that showed his sense of general understanding of transgression. But it certainly didn't correspond with the degree ...

So in the case of the ability of a 6-year-old to understand the components of a complex legal situation such as this, even when we turn to a very gifted child, a child in understanding this, understood that it was wrong, but really didn't have the specific understanding of the magnitude of transgression or how we as a society react to something that we call attempted murder. In the case of adults we have this colloquial notion of attempted murder that we see on the screen every night on our television. But when we're talking about a 6-year-old, even gifted 6-year-olds don't grasp minimally the components of the crime, can't really understand what we as a society are concerned about...

Q: There have been other cases of violence involving very young children, in England, in Chicago. Do you think it's something that people should be overly concerned about?

Hyman: There have been a few other cases with very young children. There was one in Illinois, there was one in England. But we can overgeneralize from this and become very fearful, when in reality there is no social problem of very young children committing serious crime. There are isolated instances, but this is not a social problem. It is a human tragedy both for the victims and for the perpetrators of these crimes, but it's not a problem that we have to approach socially. We certainly do have enough real problems.

Q: So you don't generally see little kids as a huge threat to society?

Hyman: Despite the realities, and the very horrible realities of this case, the simple truth is that little children don't present a threat to society as perpetrators of serious crimes. That isn't a social reality, it's not an emerging social reality. Nor is it one that we would even want to fantasize about.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Hyman: Yes. I think as we look at this situation, the only element of concern as a society that we have to express in looking at young children potentially becoming more involved in criminal activity is if we criminalize them.

If we assume, in terms of policy, an increasingly extrapunitive attitude toward children, if we put more and more of them in youth authority, and if we transform our youth authorities into a prison-like structure so that the lessons that adults are learning in prison--lessons that contrast very much with any notion that we ever had as a society of rehabilitation--if these are the lessons that we are going to teach youth, then the reality of trickle-down is going to be that they are going to trickle down in the streets. If we see one commonality among impoverished youth--and unfortunately their numbers are increasing--it's that they're learning most of what they know on the streets. This is a reality that as a society we have to change. We have to take education in the classroom, beef it up, and take education in the streets and make it one of past history.

We talk a lot as a society of the needs of children and family. Unfortunately, our actions speak louder than our words. And what we've done in recent years is to increasingly impoverish children, and impoverish the families of children emotionally, financially, and educationally. We've got to turn that around or we are going to be creating youthful crime.