Dmitry Kurkin
Two teenagers armed with knives staged a massacre in the Perm school number 127, as a result of which, according to updated data, fifteen people were injured, including fourth grade students. The motives of the attackers have not yet been established: it is not even known whether they acted together or decided to find out the relationship with each other (eyewitness testimonies on this score differ). But regardless of the motives, the question "What could have been done to prevent this?" will be discussed one way or another. Moreover, this is far from the first time when teenagers decide to get even with their peers, teachers or the world around them, in which they have not found the proper understanding.
Whichever of the recent high-profile outbreaks of teenage violence you take, the focus will be on children who need psychological help
In hot pursuit, the Governor of the Perm Territory Reshetnikov ordered to tighten the requirements for security companies that ensure safety in schools in the region. The reaction is indicative and generally understandable, but at the same time belated and ineffective: mass checks of security guards, metal detectors and video surveillance systems in schools can be arranged, but they still will not give a 100% guarantee against failures (which, it seems, happened at school No. 127).
Formal measures to ensure not so much security as its appearance in general have become a sign of the new era. Sociologist Kirill Titayev, explaining why the chosen strategy of total control is ineffective, cites as an example the same framework of metal detectors in the metro: according to him, in order for the frame to work, a person must carry about 8 kilograms of iron with him, and if it works half-heartedly, then, most likely, it is something harmless like an all-metal pen or laptop. “The people who are doing the verification understand that this is a pointless job. You cannot force any person to work well, 90% of whose work is meaningless. The [remaining] 10% will be poorly executed,”says Titayev. A recent example, in general, confirms his correctness.
It seems to be obvious that preventing, for example, injury with heavy blunt objects by tightening control over heavy blunt objects, is an unrealizable idea. So, it would be worth analyzing how it actually happens that children take knives in their hands to deal with problems. “It doesn't matter what happens around, how they treat me, I wonder if I'm needed here … life is beautiful, friends, but sometimes death is better. And maybe it would be better if I were in the place of Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] (two American teenagers who staged a massacre at Columbine School. -) ", - wrote a 15-year-old student of Ivanteevsk School No. 1, later who went there with a cleaver and an air gun. “I loved you, but you yourself did not notice how you destroyed my psyche and life,” - this is one of the Pskov teenagers who opened fire on police officers in 2016. Whichever of the recent high-profile outbreaks of teenage violence you take, the focus will be on children with psychological problems. Those who, in an amicable way, should be dealt with by the school psychological service.
It is she who could become an effective prevention against aggressive behavior (the problem of which, of course, is not limited only to extreme manifestations such as armed attacks on teachers and classmates). However, public opinion still prefers to work through a system of prohibitions. Did the student play shooters? Let's ban shooters. Listened to industrial metal? Let's ban industrial metal. Interested in the history of Columbine School? We will forbid any mention of the school. And at the same time the Internet. As if you can shield a person from any trigger that can provoke him.
There are one and a half to two thousand students per school psychologist in the country, and salaries are often lower than teachers'
In Russia, it seems, they still do not believe in the profession of a school psychologist. Either because, according to the old habit, it is customary to shift the care of the psychological state of students to the teachers of the humanities - they must also be the Teacher of the Soul, a kind of collective Vyacheslav Tikhonov from the film "We'll Live Until Monday." Either because of the system of financing secondary schools, which, to put it mildly, is in a deplorable state: according to various estimates (1, 2, 3), the average rate of a school psychologist in Russia today ranges from 5 to 15 thousand rubles per month, but in any case, psychologists are not paid less in any area.
In the 2000s, this led to the fact that teachers who did not have the proper qualifications began to take on the functions of school psychologists as an additional extra job. The hack did not go unnoticed: in 2008, the participants of the roundtable entitled "Psychology in Schools - Problems or Solutions?" turned to the State Duma with a request to limit the activities of school psychologists by law. As an example, both real cases of abuse and the scandal in Yekaterinburg were cited, where the parents of students qualified sexual education by psychologists as propaganda of "homosexuality, pedophilia, group sex and drugs." And if in itself the requirement to adopt a law on school psychologists seemed reasonable, then the proposal to prohibit specialists from communicating with children without the written consent of the parents effectively nullified the initiative: a teenager who has problems in relations with parents will not go to them for written consent to discuss these problems with a psychologist.
One way or another, educational psychology in Russia found itself in a pen, and they remembered about it already towards the end of 2016 - shortly after the story with the Pskov schoolchildren. It was only then that the Ministry of Education finally drew attention to the fact that there are one and a half to two thousand students per school psychologist in the country, and salaries are often lower than teachers' salaries.
At the same time, it turned out that the existing services systematically ignore a huge number of children who may need the help of a specialist. “The fact is that by prosperous we mean families in which parents do not drink and have a permanent job, but in fact, psychologists still understand under trouble as psychological ill-being - lack of trusting relationships in the family, detachment, dysfunctional methods of upbringing, various forms of domestic violence,”said Anna Portnova, head of the Department of Clinical Psychiatry for Children and Adolescents at the Serbsky Center. Judging by the fresh headline "A teenager who attacked a school in Perm grew up in a prosperous family", this substitution of concepts still prevails: the same news claims that the student has had problems with his parents for the past few years.
Now, when many of the circumstances of yesterday's incident are still not clear, the last thing you want to do is speculate and play on the feelings of worried parents and victims. But if we continue to ignore the problem of providing psychological assistance in Russian schools - and it has been systematically ignored for many years - such incidents will almost certainly repeat itself. If a teenager, to whom only the lazy one does not tell that he has "his whole life ahead", takes up arms, this means that the arguments were unconvincing. Therapy is not a panacea for outbursts of violence, but when choosing between spending money on the work of a school psychologist or imposing three more rows of frames, turning the school into a regime object, it seems that it is worth putting first.