The bullies, three other
teen girls and a boy, ordered the victim to sit down, an action that
tightened the scarf around her neck, making her gasp for air and cry
even louder for pardon. The torturers swore profusely, insulted her
and threatened to cut her with a broken bottleneck, until one of the
participants (evidently, the one taking a video of the crime with the
cell phone) said “Enough, let her go home,” and the female gang
leader, thankfully, listened.
The
video was shot in Mariupol, a city of 464,000 people in Donetsk Oblast, in mid-March, policy say It was
reported that the victim, an eighth grader, was bullied by these nine-grader
girls for about two years regularly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8wo8bsIxejk
The video shocked even the
Ukrainian public, immunized to violence by daily jabs coming from the
news. An avalanche of condemnation descended on the perpetrators of
the crime on YouTube and social networks. Some called the teen
torturers names, other wished them the same fate or worse and still
others wanted them to rot in jail and even threatened revenge.
But paradoxically, guilty
as they may be, the bully girls are victims too. They are the victims
of Ukraine’s evil social order. They are the victims of the cult of
violence and brutal, raw power that is rising in Ukraine.
It is showing its ugly
face anywhere from dumb cop-themed soap operas on TV to rich brats
killing people on the roads and getting away unpunished. The very
structure of power, the hard force and fear that holds it together –
all of this is mirrored in the torture of a frail teenager in
Mariupol who for two years kept the bullying hush-hush, believing
that there is no safety net that can save her from her troubles.
She was right.
The whole law enforcement
system failed her, as well as the educational system and the social
support system – everything that is supposed to be provided to us
by the country. All of it is broken like that bottle the victim was
threatened with.
The teen torturers are
victims of this broken society. They need rehabilitation more than
punishment. Incidentally, being underage, they can only be punished
for extortion of money from the victim, if that is proved in court.
These children have
clearly lost out. It may be that they had not gotten the
attention that they needed from their
parents. In most families in Ukraine, both parents are working and
trying to make ends meet. Despite that, Ukraine is unique in Europe
because of the widespread phenomenon of working people’s
poverty, according to Oleksandr
Paskhaver, president of the Center for Economic Development. That
means that families struggle to pay the bills even if all adults
work.
Moreover,
children have long become a factor that contributes to the poverty of
families. This is a thesis that has been repeated for years by Ella
Libanova, director of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies
of the National Academy of Science, who has been ringing alarm bells
about it.
Schools, which are
supposed to be the next safety net for the children after the family,
are failing to serve this purpose. In fact, the education system has
evolved to be a hybrid of rigid ministerial programming, fight for
survival for poorly paid staff and means of extorting money from
parents. This type of system alienates many bright young Ukrainians,
especially the non-conformists. Others simply break and accept this
trinity of school values: conform, survive and pay.
Many of Ukraine’s
educators live with the motto that all problems with children are the
parents’ problems. They have a ministry plan and the ever-present
need to survive.
The reaction of the
director of School 43 in Mariupol, where the torture took place, was
a textbook example of failure to show responsibility, leadership and
ethics. When presented with the video, the director’s advice was to
hide and delete it, the local media reported. The director is now
being investigated for failure to act on alert.
When schools fail, there
are no other safety nets that could support children in society,
where disregard for rules and laws has become a norm, partially
because law enforcement is selective.
There are laws that say
teenagers cannot buy alcohol or cigarettes, but most 15-year-olds in
Kyiv know where to get alcohol or cigarettes. There are laws that
spell out punishment for murder, but too many rich kids get away with
killing people on the roads and walking free.
Power and violence run the
country, so how can its children be expected to behave differently.
There are fist fights in parliament, the seat of the nation’s
democracy. There are raider attacks on business and property reported
everywhere, and no amount of money can buy one immunity from it.
Violence is used against peaceful protesters and to determine
outcomes of elections. It’s no wonder that teenagers conclude that
brute force runs everything.
Against this background,
the attack on a vulnerable teenager from a poor family that takes
care of a disabled brother looks logical and predictable. In a wild
pack, she is natural prey. Worse still, it looks like this attack is
a taste of things to come in a society run by the cult of violence
and raw power.
The systems that are meant
to prevent such crimes from happening, as well as to nurture, care
and educate, are gone or broken. Fixing them would take a long time.
In Finland, it took 10 years to initiate the reform of the education
system from the moment the society agreed in the 1960s that it needs
reform. The results were only felt in 2000s.
Here, the debate on where
we want to be as a society has not even started. Ukraine still
operates by blaming the enemy, without realizing what deep,
structural changes are needed to bring humanity to our lives. At the
moment, the cure seems too far away to even imagine. Partly, that is
because we have not even identified the ills.
Kyiv Post editor Katya
Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
