What the youth of a large Russian city knows and thinks about vandalism: the case of Yekaterinburg

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the dominant public opinion of Russian urban youth about vandalism and its forms of manifestation. The author notes that the current practice of research in social and humanitarian science is mainly focused on the analysis of specific cases of vandalism and the motivation of its subjects, while the specifics of mass representations of young people about this phenomenon remains poorly understood. Referring to the data of his own sociological research, the author seeks to take a step in overcoming this imbalance and establish the dominant attitude of Russian urban youth to the phenomenon of vandalism. The hypothesis of the work is that the ground for the spread of youth vandalism is largely created by the superficiality and flexibility of the attitude of the mass youth audience to this phenomenon.   The analysis carried out in the course of the study shows that this hypothesis turned out to be fair. It was found that vandalism as a phenomenon causes mass condemnation of young people only at the level of abstract judgments, while the real attitude of young people to processes in urban space turns out to be flexible. Many young people have an extremely narrow idea of what vandalism is, and do not consider a number of destructive activities in urban space to be its manifestations. This space itself is not perceived as inviolable: the possibility of unauthorized transformations in it does not cause mass rejection of young people. And already existing vandal damage is often simply not noticed. In general, the analysis showed that educational activities should be no less important vector of prevention of youth vandalism than the existing areas of such work.