In Utah this week, a 16-year-old girl escaped from her family farm after her father beat her for running away, for the second time, from her forced polygamous marriage to his brother, her uncle. The unidentified girl, who celebrated her seventeenth birthday in protective custody at an undisclosed location, told authorities she was her uncle's fifteenth wife. Her uncle and father were arrested and are facing all sorts of charges.

On a typical day, the Associated Press, America's lion of fast, accurate journalism, runs several stories this sickening on its wire. Reading them on an old Atex computer at my desk at work, where we get several AP wires, frequently makes me ill. The AP reports every major scandal, murder, theft, rape or other gruesome deed that makes the papers, and many too gory to hit newsprint cross the wire as well.

Reading the AP wire is a constant lesson in human error. Whether Hsun Tze was right or not about the essential evil of human nature, certain individuals indisputably are innately evil. Like most fundamental optimists, however, I failed to realize just how many of these twisted people are out there.

Revoltingly, patterns begin to sort themselves out as the stories scroll across the wire. Such portrayals would be stereotypes if they weren't true and descriptive of an individual.

Scenario A: Joe Average seemed to be a normal guy until co-workers/neighbors noticed something suspicious. Authorities then discovered bodies in his basement/child pornography on his computer hard drive/a history of incest in his family.

Scenario B: Josephine Average seemed to be a normal gal until child protective workers discovered she was raping her children/torturing her children/selling her children.

Scenario C: Terry Public Official did a competent job, but auditors found he/she was embezzling funds from the government/running drugs/operating an international porn ring/keeping an underaged lover.

Do you know these people? They live on your street. They collect your taxes. They are your relatives. Evil is not confined to one zip code. Among the child-rapists, incest perpetrators, abusive child-care providers, murderous adulterers and sadistic petty thieves, I wonder where all the normal people have gone. Does society continue to have moral standards? Do we need a formal honor code? Do we--and I say this with trepidation--need more vigilant government surveillance?

Of course, given last week's story about the child-services bureaucrat arrested for peeking up a little girl's skirt at a bookstore, that might not be the answer. And given the Baptist scandal over the minister who bought a house with his alleged mistress and allegedly embezzled from the church, the myriad Catholic priest child-molestation trials and the numerous other reports of misdeeds from just about every single religious denomination to profess a faith in the divine, I don't think we can trust the clergy any more, either.

As a believer in free will and the right of adults to choose their own paths in life, I have sympathy for a few of the offenders whose lurid stories I read on the AP wire. Juvenile delinquents are one thing. Reading the story of the teenagers who killed an unpopular classmate with a noose during a night of torture, I wondered what other factors had contributed to this crime committed by such young kids.

But consider, if you will, the father of a five-year-old girl who will soon plead guilty to sexually molesting his daughter and burning her alive during a custody battle with her mother. After confessing on an Internet chat line, he was arrested and the case re-opened despite an earlier ruling that the fire had been an accident.

Or weigh the multiple child-abuse cases in which parents and guardians systematically torture toddlers and children, starving, beating or burning them to death under the watchful eye of social service bureaucrats.

I shudder to think of these murderers as human beings, but they do share that distinction with the rest of us. What separates a serial rapist from the man in the office cubicle next to him? Society has tried to weed these people out with tougher prison sentences and sex-offender registry laws, but people are still dying horrible deaths and living brutalized lives. Only those convicted show up on the government's radar screen. The rest go undetected.

Who are they? I refuse to believe everyone has the potential to become a monster, but the line between real life and crime is so thin as to be indistinguishable to some. Only in the ability to choose right over wrong are we truly human.

Sadly, the AP wire holds no lessons for the non-criminal, only a disgusting education in the telltale signs of child abuse that might save some child's life one day. As I scroll down the wire in fascinated horror, I wonder if any of these stories have a deeper meaning beyond the bestiality of some twisted souls. I don't think they do.

Chana R. Schoenberger '99, an executive editor of The Crimson and an Adams House resident, is spending the summer interning at The Boston Globe in the business section.