Cloud7
Full Member
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2016
- Messages
- 12,908
I was certainly far from mature as a fifteen year old. At that age me and my friends snuck alcohol into school and got suspended for it two weeks before writing our equivalent of GCSE examsThere's no hard and fast rule to some supposed level of maturity of teenagers, in this case a 15 year old. Maybe you can remember being 15 and that you were quite mature. Certainly we expect children over the age of ten to know the difference between right and wrong and they can be tried differently in courts etc. However teenagers even knowing right from wrong frequently make the wrong choices. I guess that is where maturity comes in.
I don't know if you've watched any of the interviews with Shamima but she comes across as what we used to be able to call "a bit thick" but instead maybe suggest she could be learning disabled, or just immature. At 19 making the choices she has but making them at 15 and living in a very different culture, a war zone at times, her maturity may not have developed much further. It would be nice to know the facts. One poster has suggested she may be autistic. Possibly. From her eye contact movements and speech, she could be on the spectrum. We don't know.
I haven't seen anyone with even an ounce of compassion or old fashioned 'sympathy' though not suggest that she needs to face our justice system, she did after all make the choices she has taken. We can still have compassion without forgetting what she has done. Forgiveness is entirely separate.
PS. Also meant to suggest that as she comes across she may have some level of PTSD. Might not change much but may go some way to explaining the way she is coming across. However, we still don't know.
Actions like that I can understand. I guess where I differ from a lot on here is things that you just know are wrong and evil, and still participate in it. An example would be the fact that I have racist family members who would say their brainless nonsense around me, the kind of thing that people would call “brainwashing” or “indoctrination” or whatever on here, yet I always knew to myself, this is absolutely wrong, and took none of it on board. Similarly anyone who can look at what ISIS is doing and not think that they are pure evil, and not only that, but actively join them, that’s a very far cry from taking alcohol to school. A six year old can look at what ISIS were doing and realize that they were pure evil. I don’t think it’s holding anyone to too high a standard to say that as a teenager you can’t just chalk something like that up as ‘making a mistake’.
Edit: Apologies for not replying to your entire post, got cut short before I could phrase my thoughts on that properly.