Children’s Destructiveness: Violence in Lithuania and Prevention Programs
Algimantas Jasulaitis, Vladas Sniečkus, Gerda Andriuškevičiūtė, Linas Janauskas, Neringa Mačiulytė
Summary
Children destructiveness and aggression is becoming an urgent problem all over the world. The children’s violence problem is being widely discussed, but it’s worth emphasizing that they usually are one of the most common aggressors themselves. The scale and form of child aggression are well ahead of those for adults. Nowadays children are not just passive observers or victims of aggression, but more often they become active aggressors and perpetrators acting spontaneously or by plan.
Children aggression is a very sensitive issue in Lithuania. Usually all the effort goes into reforming juvenile offenders rather than analysis and eradication of main causes of children aggression. Currently, public attention is focused on drug addiction and prevention problems as children’s aggressiveness is mostly left forgotten.
In this article the trend of younger aggressors, violent injuries, the situation in Lithuania and prevention programs are reviewed.
Aim. To analyze and compare Lithuanian and foreign research data on children’s aggression and destructiveness. Identify the common places of children’s committed violent injuries in the context of children’s injuries in Lithuania, to emphasize the most frequent locations of violence. Review and compare the violence prevention programs and other measures used to deal with child aggression in foreign countries and in Lithuania.
Materials and Methods. Lithuanian and foreign authors data on child destructiveness and aggression. The re sults are evalu ated by de scrip tive statistical methods.
Conclusions. Children aggression and violence tendencies are becoming a matter of high importance as destructiveness in our society increases, but it is still a hardly debated topic in our country. Children’s traumas as a result of viol ence initiated by other children are as important and dangerous as those caused by adults. There is lack of effective and systematic research done on the topics of child aggression scale and efficiency evaluation of preventive programs in Lithuania. There is obvious lack of initiatives and investments for imposing the eftective and already world wide proven pre ven tive measures. Lithuanian juvenile delinquents are becoming younger and more cruel.
Keywords: children, injuries, criminality, prevention.