The movie that introduced the now-famous Ellen Page is Hard Candy, a locally produce film (Vulcan Pictures) about a 14-year-old girl who captures and brutally tortures a pedophile. What I had to say about the film:

Hard Candy is a pure fantasy—and a very dangerous one, at that. At Sundance, the president of Lions Gate (who bought the film for $4 million) told reporters that Hard Candy could sell as "a female-empowerment [horror] movie." But how many 14-year-olds in the world (girls or boys) have the intellectual and financial resources to orchestrate, against a pedophile, a revenge that is as elaborate and efficacious as the one in Hard Candy? A person of that age is, in reality, just a child—and this is precisely where the film, in theory, falls apart. If she can act as an adult, then she can be judged as one. But her form of empowerment is a fantasy, whereas a 14-year-old receiving an adult judgment is a reality.

Americans always find it hard to believe that children are not individuals; children are becoming individuals, and this process is incredibly slow for humans. (Indeed, a human brain does not reach the end of its development until the early 20s.) So, minors are, one, not individuals, and, two, very vulnerable. The most a minor can do is reflect, respond to, be shaped by the world they find themselves in. And the world they find themselves in happens to be more social than the worlds of all other mammals. A 14-year-old is not a woman; she is a child, and as such does not have the agency/force/command/emotional resources of an adult female.

The same goes for those boys captured on the video, going on and on about rape and death. The reason that video is so unwatchable is because we are stuck in a room with unfinished brains that have been filled to the brim with such nonsense. As much as we want to punish and treat the Rape Team as adults, they are only boys (16), have the minds of boys, and the reasoning powers of boys. We should not be throwing their names and images around in public; this is something you do to grown up offenders, to individuals who really know what they are doing and saying. The problem with these boys is to be found for the most part in how they're being socialized—their parents, culture, religion, and political/economic system. No one comes from nothing.