Child cruelty The problem of child cruelty has always existed. However, in the twentieth century. According to statistics, a wave of child violence has swept through the prosperous countries of Europe and America. In Poland, a girl hanged herself after being bullied by classmates and filmed. In UK schools, a real epidemic of bullying has been recorded - systematic physical violence, verbal abuse and intimidation of children by classmates. In America since the 1960s. teenage crime has increased 5 times. And in our country these data are not reassuring. About 8% of crimes in the country - that is, up to 155 thousand crimes per year - are committed by children and adolescents. According to experts, most modern children from 8 to 17 years old would agree to be torturers. 6% of schoolchildren are ready to kill if it is paid for. And so on... There is no particular desire to list all these facts. Where does aggression come from among the “flowers of life”? Let's try to understand this complex issue. Throughout the life of mankind, people have always shown cruelty to their own kind. Many scientists have tried to determine the nature of cruelty, the causes of its occurrence, and the factors contributing to its formation and manifestation. All currently existing theories of aggression can be divided into four main categories. The first considers the biological conditioning of aggressiveness as an innate instinctive, genetically programmed form of behavior. And based on this, even the most positive changes in the environment are not able to prevent its manifestation. At most, perhaps weaken it. And if a person has a certain gene, then he will follow the criminal path. In addition, aggression is associated with impaired brain function. A. Raine and his colleagues used scans to measure the brain activity of killers whose cruelty could not be explained either by homelessness or violence they experienced as children, and found brain abnormalities in the brains of men prone to antisocial behavior. The second group of theories considers aggression as a need and impulse that arises in response to what happens to a person in life. An experiment conducted by S. Milgram on volunteers showed that 35% of people have a strong reaction against rigidity. And 65% of the subjects were placed in such conditions that they behaved cruelly, but in most cases they showed a reaction of indignation or rejection of the sadistic type of behavior. In another prison experiment conducted by F. Zimbardo, it was shown that, under the influence of circumstances, a person can reach any state he wants, contrary to all his ideas about morality, contrary to personal decency and all social principles, values ​​and norms. This theory also includes facts of torture and humiliation of human dignity in the Delta prison at Guantanamo Bay by American soldiers who were respectable citizens in ordinary life. That is, most people in certain conditions (self-defense, the role of “executioner”, orders, etc.) can show cruelty, although under normal conditions they are not prone to violence. A person’s behavior changes especially strongly under the influence of a group. The law of the crowd comes into play when the mass becomes stupid, that is, the general level of intelligence decreases. Each individual would not have done this, but in a crowd, personal responsibility for what they did is removed. And in adolescence, the desire to be accepted into a peer group is stronger than any other need. Remember the film “Scarecrow” by R. Bykov, where teenagers, succumbing to the influence of informal class leaders, declare a boycott of a girl who is different from everyone else. It is no secret that every social group has its own “outsiders” - children who, for various reasons, have become outcasts (personal, intellectual, physical - disability, reduced vision, low financial status of the family, etc.). And few teenagers will want to stand up for the one against whom the majority has taken up arms, so as not to be the samerejected by the group. The third group of theories takes into account such aspects of human experience as cognitive activity and emotions. All information that a person receives and any life experience causes certain emotional reactions. In particular, from the point of view of L. Berkowitz, aggression arises insofar as a negative reaction to aggressive stimuli (pain, illness, unpleasant odors, etc.) is formed. M. Zilman argued that comprehension of an event can influence the degree of arousal. Proponents of this theory argue that it is possible to manage aggression and control behavior by “simple” teaching people to realistically imagine potential dangers and adequately assess threatening situations. We adults are accustomed to restraining our emotions, but children are not. They are in full swing. If there is resentment, then mortal, if happiness, then boundless, and if cruelty, then pronounced. It is clear that children do not have life experience, so teenagers cannot always predict the consequences of their actions. Emotions overwhelm the mind and consciousness, so the child performs an action, and then thinks whether it is right. Just because your child hits someone does not mean that he will grow up to be a bully. The manifestation of aggressiveness and cruelty is a certain stage in a child’s growing up. He must realize, experience and learn to control his negative emotions. Unconscious childhood cruelty passes without a trace over time. But if a teenager deliberately causes pain to others and understands that this is bad, this is already a reason to worry and take action. With the spread of social networks on the Internet, the phenomenon of “publicizing” private life arose. In order to increase their ratings, teenagers film violent scenes (which are extremely popular because they evoke strong feelings in viewers) and post them on their pages. Thus, the participants in the beating become heroes of films, and this adds courage and cruelty doubles, reinforced by this drive, and is multiplied by the cruelty seen from the screen. According to the fourth theory of social learning, aggression is a model of social behavior acquired in life. Aggressive reactions are learned and supported through direct participation in situations of aggression (cruelty of close adults), as well as through passive observation of aggressive manifestations. In Illarion Pavlyuk’s documentary “The Cruelty Gene,” an experiment is conducted in which six Moscow teenagers are studied. The lie detector records their physiological reactions that arise when viewing selected scenes of violence. The results make you think: only one person experiences changes in state, which are associated with sympathy and empathy that arises from what he sees at the moments when the characters experience pain... For the rest, the reactions do not change, that is, they do not react in any way to the suffering of others. As it turned out, the authors of the film, it is this only teenager who is still capable of empathy who watches TV the least due to the restrictions set by his parents. Perhaps this triggers a psychological defense mechanism that protects the little man from the continuous flow of negative information from TV screens and printed pages, containing a bloody crime chronicle, sophisticated scenes of violence, murder, bullying, which are presented with special gusto in feature films and even in cartoons. Not only in cinema, but also in everyday life there are plenty of examples of impunity for cruelty and encouragement of violence. If a child sympathizes and experiences strong emotional experiences with every cruel scene he sees, then his heart will simply not stand it. And a kind of immunity to other people’s pain appears, protecting the little person from psychological trauma. And a person who is unable to worry about another can cause harm to him. It turns out that children behave this way because violence has become the norm in society. What can parents do to.