This really has nothing to do with modern society and technology. As reasonable as it may seem to pull out the old "back in my day" and lambast modern youth for being amoral hoodlums, in reality most of the time you're just putting on a pair of rose-tinted glasses and pretending that your own shit (or the collective shit of your generation) doesn't stink.
The hard facts of the matter are that, in the US, violent crime rates hit their peak in the 1990's. Violent crime rates have been mostly decreasing since then. Homicides committed by 14-17 year old people was highest in 1993 with 12 homicides per 100,000 people in that age group, for instance. Homicides by people younger than 14 have always been a tiny number, only 0.1-0.2 homicides committed per 100,000 children under 14, so that age group is kind of worthless for tracking trends in violence.
Anyway, mid-90's was really the big time for murder (and all other violent crime, but let's focus on the murder). Murder rates now are about half what they were at their worst in the 90's. Seems to me that this shatters the whole "kids today are worse than they were back in my generation" idea you're proposing, assuming you're old enough to have been a teen in the 90's and actually look at teens today as a wholly separate generation (which, for those who might not be aware, is a period anywhere from 20-30 years, depending on various factors that people in social science circles can never seem to agree on). If you're younger than that and taking a looser view of generation in a social context, say calling it a 10 year gap, then you could look at the homicide rates from about 10 years ago and find that they're just about the same as modern homicide rates; they're actually a bit lower for the younger demographics, as it so happens.
The whole "ugh, kids today" angle just doesn't hold up in the face of the facts unless you were a teen in the 60's or prior and thus around to experience a time when youth homicide rates were unequivocally lower than they are today. They're definitely different, what with modern technology and changing social trends, but they're not becoming more violent. Sorry to burst your bubble on that one.
Anyway, the other questions you asked.
Cosmos said:
do children at this age understand right and wrong? Is it possible that the law isn't updated to what really is today?
Cosmos said:
are children capable of such monstrous acts?
Psychology says yes, children do understand right and wrong at this age. There have actually been recent studies done that show even babies as young as 6 months can have a general sense of right and wrong.
Here's an article about some of them. A ten year old kid would absolutely know that physically assaulting someone is wrong, unless he has some kind of mental illness that inhibits empathy or reasoned decision making.
Are children capable of such things? Well, yeah, obviously. It happens, thus they're capable of doing some atrocious shit.
The real question is whether or not they're capable of planning out murder and doing so with malicious intent, and that's part of what makes the law kind of iffy about youths committing violence. The laws for adults say (in much fancier legal terminology) that if you're mentally unstable to the point that you can't control or don't understand your own actions or their consequences, then you can't be held accountable in the same way as sane and rational people, thus they get carted off to psychiatric facilities instead of prisons. The problem with kids committing violent crimes is that psychology is anything but united on when various things happen in mental development, and there are all sorts of societal and biological things that tell us that kids can't really do such bad things and if they do then it's really not their fault and blah blah blah. So is the law not actually in line with the reality of the matter? Probably not, but there currently is no definitive solution to the problem, so there's not a ton to be done about it.
