Children's Stories.

In allowing this particularly violent story in our curriculum,
we followed the lead of writers such as Cooper
(1993) and Engel (1999; 2005), who argue that stories
create a much-needed space where children can play with
ideas that concern or frighten them. Cooper believes that
stories empower children. Rather than encouraging further
violence, they simply give children opportunities to play
out, and thus diffuse, scary material. Similarly, Engel
argues that children understand stories are different from
real life. Because stories don’t represent the real world,
they give children a clearly defined, safe place to explore
scary, taboo, or otherwise worrisome ideas.