News of youthful violence is all too familiar to us: the shootings, stabbings, bombings perpetrated by young people are the stuff we—necessarily—analyze, search for patterns, try to make sense of, as we did two weeks ago in the wake of Elliot Rodger’s massacre in Isla Vista.

But this week came a different kind of story, about two 12-year-old neighbors from the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, who stabbed one of their friends nearly to death in the woods. According to reports, one of the assailants pushed the victim down and told the other, “Go ballistic. Go crazy,” before the other did as instructed, stabbing the girl 19 times as she cried, “I hate you. I trusted you.” The stabbing victim survived and crawled to the edge of the woods for help; her two attackers were arrested. One of them reportedly told police, “It was weird that I didn’t feel remorse,” while the other described a more torn reaction: “The bad part of me wanted her to die. The good part of me wanted her to live.”

The press and local authorities promptly glommed on to the admittedly shivery detail of the story: that the stabbers claimed to have acted in an effort to appease “Slenderman,” a fictional child-stalker whose spectral presence has been created, spread and improvised upon by scores of chat-room users, filmmakers, and online storytellers.

There are three particularly defining elements to this story: that authorities want to prosecute these pre-teens, who may have acted based on a fictionalized belief system, as adults; that the assailants are young women who do not fit the description of disaffected masculinity that has become so horrifyingly linked to instances of youthful violence; and that everyone immediately decided that this was a story about the evils of internet technology. "Unmonitored and unrestricted access to the Internet by children is a growing and alarming problem," said Waukesha Police Chief Russell Jack in a press conference on Monday. "This should be a wake-up call for parents. Parents are strongly encouraged to restrict and monitor their children's Internet usage."

But what’s interesting about the case, or at least the little we know about it so far, is not that it’s an example of a new and looming online threat. Rather, it appears to echo patterns of behavior—belief in culturally-supported fantasies, tightly-cathected bonds between young women, an intensity of connection that has occasionally led to violence—that have occurred repeatedly, in various forms, throughout history and around the world. And they happen outside the heterosexual framework we use to understand Rodgers’ misogynistic rampage. This crime is one that reminds us of the central role that homosocial bonding plays in the lives of the many young women who spend their adolescent years battling, and occasionally “seeing,” their own demons.