“He hit the baby with his head”: the increase in crimes against children is associated with stress

Massacre of the innocents

In the city of Kopeisk, Chelyabinsk region, a 29-year-old man beat an 11-month-old girl. The incident occurred in the evening. The child’s mother and her friend and roommate first indulged in alcoholic pleasures, then the women went out to get some air, leaving the man at home. At this time the baby began to cry. The guy gave her a bottle, but it didn’t help. The man began to force her to drink, injured her mouth, the girl became hysterical, and then he hit her forcefully on the head several times.

The mother’s friend returned from her walk first. She called an ambulance. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed the baby with a traumatic brain injury, concussion, bruises to the ear and cheek. A criminal case was opened against the man. It turned out that the suspect was convicted in 2012, and for the same crime – beating a person…

In the Krasnoyarsk Territory, a father twice attempted to kill his one-month-old son. The first time he pressed him to his chest with such force because he was crying that he broke two of the baby’s ribs. The case was put on hold, but a couple of months later it happened again: the father hit the baby’s head on a chair. And again because he was crying too loudly. This time it was not possible to get out of the criminal case.

In the village of Bagan in the Novosibirsk region, a would-be father attempted to murder his 3-month-old daughter. And again – for crying. The baby was “attached” to the back of the sofa three times.

In Yekaterinburg, a man attacked his two-year-old niece. He threatened her with a can opener and fork. The police arrived at the moment when the uncle was strangling the baby.

In the Kemerovo region, parents jointly beat a baby to death.

And all these are very recent cases.

“No matter how much we would like the opposite, the statistics of domestic violence have been growing recently,” states Sergei Enikolopov, Doctor of Psychology, author of a series of lectures on the “psychology of evil.” – Children and women are the first victims. Why do men lose their temper? Dads are increasingly forced to also take care of children, including infants. But many men believe that they should not take part in “women’s affairs”; for such, the trigger is triggered more often and more powerfully.

– Killing your offspring is a counter-biological act. A person in his right mind would never do this, says psychotherapist Evgeniy Idzikovsky. – But where there is no money, everyday life creates increasing stress. When it’s really hard for people to live, they constantly swear, they can use substances, and under them they break down, people under stress release the brakes. Just like a person breaks a phone or destroys furniture, a rational person will not do this either. If a person kills a child in a sober mind, then he has problems with psychiatry of varying degrees. The fact that there is no diagnosis does not mean anything; deviations are often not identified.

Help “MK”. According to Rosalkogoltabakkontrol data, retail sales of alcohol for 9 months of 2023 in the Russian Federation increased by 4.4%.

Uneven fight

The results of several UN expert studies indicate that a “culture of violence” is taking effect in many countries. This violence begins with everyday rudeness – on the roads, in shops, in transport, on the street. And the first victims are again children. How to explain aggression towards those who are obviously incapable of a symmetrical response?

A monstrous incident occurred in Moscow. A 21-year-old kickboxer knocked out a 15-year-old teenager. The beating took place on the street. The boy was crossing the road with his younger brother and grandmother. A group of tipsy guests of the capital was moving towards them. One of them stepped on the teenager’s foot and did not apologize. He made a remark, and in response received a well-aimed kick to the chest. Everything happened with professional speed, my brother and grandmother didn’t even have time to come to their senses. The child lost consciousness. He soon died in the hospital.

The story had a loud resonance. The athlete turned out to have a previous conviction. He faces 15 years in prison.

In the Leningrad region, a father rebuked his son’s offender. An 11-year-old schoolboy complained of bullying. The parents saw that the boy came home with dirty clothes and bruises. When his son’s phone was broken, his father couldn’t stand it. He went out to the offenders and dispersed the company, breaking the ribs of one of them.

In Ulan-Ude, children hit the windshield of a car with a snowball. The driver stopped the car, got out and tried to find out from the teenagers who exactly threw the snowball. According to eyewitnesses, the man shouted at them, but could not identify the culprit, so he decided to punish the first child he came across.

– A man and a woman living in the alley stood up for the boy. Only after the woman started screaming that she would call the police did the aggressive driver get into the car and drive away, witnesses said.

In the city of Arsenyev, a mother did not like the way her daughter did her homework; for educational failures, she beat her with a piece of high-voltage cable. The torture began in first grade; the girl did not want to go home after school and sat in class until the evening. At the same time, my mother was one of the most active parents at school and was a member of the school council. One day a girl came to school, and the teachers gasped: there was no living space on her face – just a continuous bruise. “I was aware that I could kill her,” the child’s mother later said. Now she has been deprived of parental rights, the child is in a shelter.

Help “MK”. In the first half of 2022, Russians bought 6 million packages of antidepressants, which is 1.5 times more than a year earlier.

“The increase in the number of mental disorders in Russia is alarming; in some regions over the past year it amounted to over 25%,” explains psychologist and psychotherapist Oleg Shevchenko. – I think that the number of undetected cases, when a diagnosis has not been made and none of the person’s relatives even knows about the person’s condition, is much greater. In the vast majority of cases, crimes against children are committed by people with mental disabilities or those in borderline states. The number of such painful conditions has been quite understandably growing in the last year: people are experiencing increased anxiety, constant stress due to ongoing military operations, uncertainty about the future, falling living standards, etc. Therefore, the number of cases of attacks on children is increasing – I emphasize that these are unmotivated crimes , they cannot be explained either by personal gain or by an emotional attitude to a specific situation. These are explosions of negativity, accumulated negative energy. And its accumulation is associated, among other things, with the information background, with the militarization of the daily agenda, with a lack of understanding of the future, with a feeling of hopelessness – even if a person does not realize this, he can feel this at the subconscious level, and his psyche is gradually destroyed.

Post-traumatic syndrome

A monstrous murder happened in Lipetsk. The fighting reached the house of a mother with many children. The woman’s husband, a former fighter of the Wagner PMC, killed his wife’s 4-year-old daughter from her first marriage. Losing his temper, he hit his stepdaughter on the head with his hand and with his foot on the body. The blow was not calculated well, the girl died on the spot. The reason was allegedly jealousy towards the child – the man accused his wife of neglecting their twin daughters and devoting more time to the older girl. The former fighter committed a crime while drunk. The wife of a “Wagnerite” believes that the tragedy was provoked by “vodka and shell shock.”

Psychologist Marina Suraeva, who worked in a military hospital near Donetsk, explains what post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is:

– The very first manifestation is stress insomnia. After returning to civilian life, soldiers cannot sleep for months. Of course, in the hospital they will be fed sleeping pills, but at home everything returns. A person without sleep is a psychological zombie. If alcoholism is added to this – and in our country all spiritual wounds are still treated with alcohol – then he can go crazy at any moment. But “to blow the roof off” is a term from everyday psychiatry. In the case of PTSD, this is called a “flashback.”

– A flashback is when, under the influence of some trigger, a former military man is again transported into battle conditions. After all, in war they live by reflexes,” answers psychologist Evgeniy Idzikovsky. – With PTSD, the level of immersion is deep, as in hypnosis. Reflexes work at lightning speed, because a person at the front trains to live by reflexes. Do you know how participants in the war in Afghanistan were checked back in the day? They shouted to him: “There’s a flash on the right,” and he, walking with his girlfriend in civilian clothes, fell into the mud with lightning speed. Why? Because in war conditions it was the only way to save your life. It is impossible to predict what may trigger it in everyday life. Everyone has their own “flash”.

– Why weren’t there so many cases of murders of children after the Great Patriotic War, when huge soldiers with PTSD also returned? – Marina Suraeva argues. – Because the front-line soldiers felt like heroes. They were celebrated and honored. They returned as winners. The entire society worked for the post-war restoration of the country, and the former military, for the most part, organically joined this process. And after Afghanistan and Chechnya, there were already numerous crimes committed by former military personnel, including against children, on whom they took out their resentment and anger. People “in civilian life” did not understand what they had experienced. They lived their own lives and did not appreciate their sacrifices. We cannot say what will happen in society after the special operation. The situation is not over yet. But we must listen to the first “calls” and draw conclusions.