The Adults We Stop Holding Responsible

Christa Pike survived a lethal injection. But it was not the first thing she survived. On 30 September 2026, Tennessee attempted to execute Pike for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was 18 when she committed the crime. She was given two doses of pentobarbital during the execution attempt and remained alive. She was eventually taken to hospital, critically injured. [1]

There is something almost impossible about the sequence of those facts. But I am interested in a different sequence. Long before Christa Pike became the person whose name appeared in reports about a failed execution, she was a child. Court filings and clinical assessments describe a childhood marked by severe and repeated sexual abuse, physical violence, emotional abuse, neglect and instability. Her lawyers have also presented evidence that her mother drank during pregnancy and that Pike had organic brain impairment affecting the frontal lobe. Expert material submitted in her litigation describes the severity of the trauma she experienced before her arrest as extreme. [2]

There were moments when adults outside the family knew that something was badly wrong. Court filings citing social-service records describe Pike being removed from her home as a teenager and placed in a state-run residential facility. A social worker recorded concerns that her mother was unwilling to protect her interests and documented emotional abuse by her father. Child Protective Services later closed the case, according to those filings, and Pike returned home. The same filing says there was no follow-up to establish her wellbeing after her return. [3]

Years later, we know exactly where responsibility landed. It landed on Christa Pike. And it should have. What she and the others involved did to Colleen Slemmer was horrifying. Slemmer was 19 years old. She was subjected to a prolonged assault, tortured and killed. Whatever happened to Pike before that night does not transfer responsibility for Slemmer's murder to somebody else. Childhood abuse does not make a victim less dead. Trauma does not make cruelty harmless. [4]

I want to be very clear about that because I think discussions like this often become trapped in a false choice. Either we talk about the victim, or we talk about the childhood of the person who harmed them. Either we demand accountability, or we try to understand. Either Christa Pike was a victim, or she became a perpetrator. But human lives do not respect that kind of moral tidiness.

Christa Pike was a child to whom terrible things were done. She became an adult who did something terrible to another person. Both sentences have to be allowed into the same room. What interests me is what happens to everyone else once the second sentence becomes true.

Responsibility suddenly becomes remarkably concentrated. There is an offender, a trial, a sentence, a prison cell. Eventually, in this case, there is an execution chamber. We know where to put the blame because there is finally one person whose actions are impossible to dispute. But responsibility did not begin in the woods where Colleen Slemmer was killed.

There were adults before that. People who hurt a child. People who failed to protect her. Institutions that encountered her distress. Records. Interventions that began and ended. Opportunities when somebody had more power than the child did to alter what happened next.

None of those people killed Colleen Slemmer. That distinction matters enormously. But I don't think it follows that their responsibility disappears simply because another, much greater responsibility eventually appeared. We like responsibility when it has a single address. It is administratively convenient. Morally, too. One person did the terrible thing, so one person becomes the place where the story ends.

What I find harder to accept is how easily the existence of an accountable adult can make us forget the adults who were accountable when that person was still a child. There is research behind the reason this matters, although it needs to be handled carefully. Childhood maltreatment does not turn children into violent adults. Most people who experience abuse do not go on to commit serious violence. But neither is childhood maltreatment irrelevant.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 18 prospective studies involving 39,271 participants found that childhood maltreatment was associated with a modest increase in later violent outcomes. The researchers also found substantial variation between studies. Maltreatment was a risk factor, not a deterministic pathway. [5] A separate meta-analysis looking specifically at women reached a similarly careful conclusion. Across 34 studies, childhood maltreatment was positively associated with later aggression, but the overall association was small. [6]

That distinction is essential: risk is not destiny, and explanation is not exoneration. Understanding how somebody became capable of cruelty is not an act of disloyalty to the person who suffered from it. I think we sometimes behave as though explanation competes with accountability. If I spend too much time asking what happened to the perpetrator, perhaps I am somehow diminishing what the perpetrator did. I don't see why those things should cancel each other out. If anything, understanding the pathways through which children are damaged should make responsibility larger, not smaller.

It should make us ask more people questions. Who knew? Who should have known? Who had the power to intervene? Who intervened and then stopped? Who decided that a child was safe enough to return?

And, perhaps most importantly, what kind of responsibility do we assign to failures that occur years before their consequences become visible? That last question is difficult because causation becomes dangerous very quickly. We cannot say that if one social worker had made a different decision, Colleen Slemmer would be alive. We cannot know that. Nor can we say that Pike's parents, a school, a child-protection agency or any other institution caused her later crime in the way that Pike and those who participated in the attack caused Slemmer's death.

They did not. There are abused children who become extraordinarily gentle adults. There are people raised in loving homes who commit terrible acts. Between childhood and adulthood are temperament, biology, relationships, opportunities, choices, chance and thousands of experiences that make simple causal stories impossible. But uncertainty about causation should not become an excuse for indifference to responsibility.

A child does not have to grow up and kill someone before the adults who failed that child have failed. The failure already happened. That may be the part I find most disturbing. We often evaluate failures of child protection retrospectively by looking at what the child eventually became. If the child survives, builds a life and causes no spectacular harm, the failures that surrounded them can disappear almost completely from public attention. If the child later commits an atrocity, suddenly everyone wants to know what went wrong.

But the moral significance of abandoning a child cannot depend on whether that child later becomes sympathetic. Protection is not something children earn by becoming good adults. They were entitled to it when they were children. This is also where I think the familiar phrase it takes a village to raise a child becomes uncomfortable.

We usually use it generously. A child is shaped by family, teachers, neighbours, institutions and communities. Development is collective. Adults matter. If we believe that when things go well, we should at least be willing to examine the village when things go terribly wrong.

Not because the village committed the crime, but because the village existed before the crime did. There is something strange about believing deeply in the formative power of childhood when we are talking about education, attachment, opportunity, language, confidence or love, and then becoming suddenly radical individualists when we talk about an adult who has done something monstrous. At that point, childhood can become background information. The adult chose. And yes, the adult did choose.

But adulthood does not arrive as an eraser. At 18, a person acquires responsibilities that they did not have at eight. They do not lose the nervous system, memories, adaptations, injuries and ways of surviving that developed during those earlier years simply because the law now calls them an adult. Research on adverse childhood experiences has documented associations between childhood adversity and later mental-health problems. A 2025 umbrella review synthesising 43 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, representing more than 14 million participants, found an overall association between ACEs and later mental-health problems. Separately, a systematic review of 199 biologically informed human studies examined evidence that childhood maltreatment and adversity can influence biological processes relevant to health and behaviour across the life course. Neither body of research allows us to predict what a particular child will become. [7, 8]

We can hold an adult responsible while still asking who was responsible for the child. Those are different questions. The tragedy is that our systems are much better equipped to answer the first one. Criminal responsibility eventually produces an enormous apparatus: police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges, juries, prisons, appeals courts and, in some places, an execution chamber.

Responsibility for a damaged childhood is much harder to locate because it is dispersed. One adult did something. Another ignored something. An institution recorded something. Someone referred a case. Someone closed one. Someone believed the child. Someone didn't.

Years pass. Then an adult does something so terrible that all those smaller moments disappear behind it. I don't think they should. And I don't think saying that requires us to soften what happened to Colleen Slemmer. If anything, Slemmer is the reason the question matters.

Prevention is not sentimental concern for people who might later become perpetrators. It is concern for the people they may eventually hurt as well. A society that becomes interested in accountability only after somebody has been tortured and killed has arrived very late to the subject. Punishment asks what we should do after the harm. Protection asks what we were responsible for before it.

We need both questions. Perhaps that is what I keep returning to in the story of Christa Pike. The state decided that she should pay for what she did with her life. Whether the death penalty is justified is a separate question, and not the one I am trying to answer here. The question I cannot get past comes earlier.

When a child is being harmed, responsibility belongs to the adults. When that child becomes an adult, responsibility for their own actions belongs to them. The second responsibility does not travel backwards through time and erase the first. Christa Pike survived a lethal injection. Before that, she survived a childhood she should never have been required to survive.

Colleen Slemmer did not survive what Christa Pike did to her. There is no moral equation that makes those facts balance. There shouldn't be. But if accountability means anything more than finding the last person in the chain whom we can punish, then perhaps we have to become willing to look backwards as well. Not to ask who else committed the crime. To ask who had a responsibility before there was a crime to commit.

Sources & Further Reading

[1] Reuters, 30 September–3 October 2026. Reporting on the attempted execution of Christa Pike, administration of pentobarbital and her subsequent critical condition. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tennessee-due-execute-woman-first-time-two-centuries-2026-09-30/

[2] Christa Gail Pike v. Tennessee, U.S. Supreme Court filings and expert reports. Evidence submitted concerning Pike's childhood abuse, prenatal alcohol exposure and organic brain impairment. https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/26-5696.html

[3] Tennessee court filing, 2021. Records and testimony concerning Pike's removal from home, Child Protective Services involvement and subsequent case closure. https://www.tncourts.gov/sites/default/files/docs/response_-_to_motion_1.pdf

[4] State of Tennessee v. Christa Gail Pike and Pike v. Gross. Primary judicial sources concerning the crime, conviction and trial record. https://www.tncourts.gov/sites/default/files/OPINIONS/TSC/PDF/984/pike.pdf

[5] Fitton, L., Yu, R., & Fazel, S. (2020). “Childhood Maltreatment and Violent Outcomes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Prospective Studies.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21(4), 754–768. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30122119/

[6] Augsburger, M., Basler, K., & Maercker, A. (2019). “Is there a female cycle of violence after exposure to childhood maltreatment? A meta-analysis.” Psychological Medicine, 49(11), 1776–1786. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30994081/

[7] Abate, B. B., et al. (2025). “Adverse Childhood Experiences Are Associated with Mental Health Problems Later in Life: An Umbrella Review of Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Neuropsychobiology, 84(1), 48–64. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39557030/

[8] Cooke, E. M., Connolly, E. J., Boisvert, D. L., & Hayes, B. E. (2023). “A Systematic Review of the Biological Correlates and Consequences of Childhood Maltreatment and Adverse Childhood Experiences.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 24(1), 156–173. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34105421/