Rethinking destructive rumors as a legal means of solving the problems of intercultural interactions

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to analyze situations of occurrence and spread of destructive rumors and, at the same time, to identify effective legal practices to counteract them in multicultural urban communities. In most cases, rumors do not reflect the factual situation, so they cannot be a tool for unbiased presentation of facts and, in the case of intercultural interaction, they can also provoke extreme and unlawful negative feelings about a certain group of people. The results of the study indicate that in the city Melitopol there are rumors about immigrants, refugees, ethnic groups, national communities or other groups, which are mostly negative. The analysis made it possible to identify the most common ethnic rumors: «Roma are thieves», «Jews are selfish»; confessional: «Muslims are terrorists»; socio-cultural: «IDPs live on state aid», «Ukrainians are cheap labor from Western Europe». Based on a qualitative analysis of social practices of Melitopol community members, in the conclusions the authors corroborate the effectiveness of ways of counteracting destructive rumors in multicultural urban communities as a legal means of solving the problems of intercultural interactions.