School Shooting as an Extreme form of Deviant Behavior: Expert Evaluations

Abstract

Such a phenomenon as school shooting, which entered the everyday life of society, frightened humanity with its cruelty and unpredictability, found a response in scientific community. The school shooting discourse is wide: from theoretical understandings (towards analysis of theories of anomie and deviance, stigmatization and criminology, the concepts of differential associative, communicative, axiological and existential approaches) to empirical justifications. They showed that this multifactorial destructive phenomenon is labile, its configuration changes along with the changing social reality, which significantly expands the research field. The study concerns the expert characteristics of this phenomenon. Authors have concluded that the most likely motive for violence in educational institutions is in most cases psychological trauma or school shooter’s disorders. Society’s reaction to school shooting is superficial and mainly reduced to appeals to limit Internet content. The root cause of tragic incidents of school shooting should be considered the deformation of value-motivational sphere of an individual in children and adolescents. The key channel for spread and rooting of destructive attitudes among young people is messengers, where teenagers and children are actively recruited. However, the main hazard lies in the fact that these virtual contacts and connections subsequently find their consolidation and materialization in real environment of educational institutions, where “cells” of destructive behavior are formed, capable of attracting more and more new participants into their orbit.