Everyone was beaten up

Sergei Yesenin in “Poem on 36” has the following lines: “After all, every boy grew up, everybody got a nose.” I read this poem about twenty years ago, just when my nose used to be beaten. Today Yesenin would have turned 124 years old, and the beating of the nose has somehow changed. Already not everyone who grows up as a boy gets literally on his nose. But is it easier for the boys from this?

I perfectly remember all the bullying in which I participated, and all the bullying, the objects of which I was. Once at a German gymnasium in the Ruhr region, German classmates poisoned me with blue suede boots. At the end of the 1990s, it was impossible for us to believe this, but German teenagers at that time all dressed in exactly the same way. Not even a carbon copy, but as if by Dolly’s cloning technology - white sneakers, wide jeans and T-shirts seven sizes larger than the real one. And who is dressed differently, he is not worthy to be a man in a provincial industrial town. Faced me with a bicycle and presented: “What are you wearing these boots? Dumb, or what? ”But all the same, enlightened Europe, German education ... They did not fight. I continued to wear boots. Nice shoes.

Already in a Moscow school, we poisoned one guy for a walk that seemed to us too feminine. And he had a sick lower back from birth. It got to a real fight, to the bullying. Forgive us, Andrey.

Today's children grow up in relatively greenhouse conditions. Thanks to a deep immersion in the virtual world, bullying has become cyberbullying.

But that did not cease to be a problem.

Perhaps the desire for dominance is an integral part of the process of human development. One who can humiliate will humiliate, and there will always be one who will be humiliated.

The chairman of the commission for the development of public diplomacy, humanitarian cooperation and the preservation of traditional values ​​of the Public Chamber of Russia (this is the longest title in the world) Elena Sutormina said that over the past period of 2019, more than 400 cases of cyberbullying were recorded on the network.

This, presumably, when the verbal skirmish grew into a serious showdown, and one of the participants then complained about the result.

Because just cases of aggressive behavior, of course, hundreds of thousands of times more. And each of them, I have no doubt, brought someone what is called mental suffering.

A generation that has never received a nose for its words has already grown and has free access to the Internet. Which, on the one hand, is good - all the same, the less physical violence, the better, of course, for everyone to live.

On the other hand, they fell to live in that period of technological development, when reasonable etiquette rules that ensure the stability of the system have not yet been developed and adopted.

The other day I was in one old provincial Russian city. Temples, monasteries, slanting houses ... And on the square in front of the administration building there was a group of teenagers, about 50 people. They had a column from which a beat sounded, two stood in the center of the circle and “fought”, that is, they raped each other competition. Standing around danced, nodded approvingly and applauded from time to time.

Rap-battle is a genre that is completely built on insults, at best rhyming. The participant’s task is to humiliate the opponent as brightly as possible in front of the crowd and to stand up to the response insults.

Insults often affect the immediate family, the alleged sexual orientation of the opponent, his appearance.

And this kind of leisure was on the central square of the old Russian city.

It was clear that all the participants were up to date with the rules. The battle is the battle. They scoffed at each other, laughed, mocked, appreciated the opponent's speech skills, and then shook hands and embraced went for one burger for two.

It's like a sport - they fight in the ring to the blood, and to the loss of consciousness. But in life they can be friends with families.

The Internet, on the other hand, is a space that is not limited by anything, the space in the mental sense is much wider than the courtyard behind the school, where, lighting with one hand, the other was hit in the eye. On the Internet, a person can, communicating with peers, get the experience of humiliation no less serious, because there are no boundaries.

60% of children under the age of 11 have personal means of accessing the Internet. That is smartphones or laptops.

Your children have one too.

Do you know where your ten year old child goes in the real world? Perhaps at this age he generally does not yet go anywhere alone. Unless to take out the garbage or go to school, if the road does not need to cross. At the same time, you are probably asking him to call you when he got to school, or you can see a note on the school’s website that he went through the turnstiles with his electronic pass.

And with whom did he communicate on the Internet? What comments were left to him in the network game? And will he tell you that he was bullied?

After all, cyberbullying does not leave bruises, but it injures no less than a direct blow.

It seemed to us, who ran to smoke behind the garages, that the unphysical effect could not do any harm. But the fact is that for the most part the world has generally moved from the physical plane to the virtual one.

Probably, some rules will be formed, some actions will be recognized as unacceptable, and the front of the streamer mothers and video bloggers will act in defense of the children.

But for now, all that remains for us is to be more attentive to our children living in a reality that they have not yet experienced and to which we are not yet accustomed.

I did not think that I would ever say this, but install the parental control application on the smartphone to the child. Just discuss the boundaries with him: you do not watch traffic, but, for example, you know exactly the time he spent on the network. You do not see the story, but by agreement you determine the range of applications used.

I don’t know if anyone will be calmer from this, but we are the pioneers of the digital era to set the rules.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.