Mass murder in educational organizations: phenomenon, mechanisms, causes, prevention

Mass murders in educational institutions pose a serious threat to public safety. In the Russian Federation, there is a tendency for the total number of such crimes to increase. School shooting is acquiring the features of a “working” socio-behavioral model among minors and young people, which is beginning to be actively used in conflict situations in educational institutions. A dangerous phenomenon, striking in its unpredictability and cruelty, requires serious comprehensive study from the point of view of criminological, sociological, pedagogical, psychological, psychiatric, information and communication, philosophical approaches. The article studies criminological criteria for classifying these incidents as mass murder, and differentiates these crimes from terrorist and extremist crimes. It describes in detail the mechanism of criminal behavior, and lists the main objective and subjective reasons for committing school shooting. From the point of view of the philosophy of postmodernism and existentialism, it shows the connection between the loss of meaning and alienation of the individual with a destructive slide into malignant narcissism and a pathological desire for the death of others. The author presents a generalized socio-psychological portrait of a student who, under certain circumstances, is capable of committing an act of violence in an educational organization, indicates the stages of personal deformation, and emphasizes the need to exclude stigmatization of a teenager when analyzing personality traits and behavior markers of a student. The article summarizes the main methods of crime prevention at the macro- and micro-levels. The author dwells in detail on the experience of preventing the risks of increasing destructive manifestations of school shooting, terrorism, extremism in the Zlatoust Pedagogical College within the framework of the first stage of the regional innovation platform to increase the level of psychological safety of students of the VEO. The most important conditions for innovative activities to prevent school shooting are the development of the personal potential of the student, the introduction of modern educational technologies, the use of the latest psychodiagnostics.