What was the girl thinking?

Many people must have been lost for words last week when they heard that a sixth-grade elementary school girl in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, had been slashed in the neck and killed by a female classmate. The incident took place during lunch break in a study room at the school -- the last place one would expect such a tragedy to occur. The attacker used a box cutter.

It has been reported that the two girls had corresponded via the Internet and that trouble arose between them over something that at least one of them had written on a Web site. We will have to wait for the investigation to reveal details of what actually happened. We need to get as close as possible to the truth about the motive for the attack.

One clue, albeit a small one, is that the attacker was carrying the box cutter in her pencil case. Possibly she felt too weak to face up to the other girl without it, or she might have felt enmity toward, or frustration with, the children around her. Perhaps she saw the cutter as a kind of talisman to make up for psychological problems.