School shooting tragedy

TRAGEDY IN KERCH

By Stephen Wilson

I'm in some dark, dim and poorly lit building. It is bursting with lively young people

chatting away to each other. Then suddenly I notice some masked man running

a mock discharging a gun leaping over some counter. Then pandemonium.

People start screaming and fleeing in all directions. I can see a gunman walking

straight up to a girl in his way shooting her even though she has raised her arms

in great fear. I myself begin to feel intense fear and wonder where I can hide.

I feel an overwhelming  atmosphere of intense fear and panic. My survival

instinct tells me to just get out. Then I wake up.

The nightmare was too real. I noticed the kitchen light was still on and my daughter

and son in law were chatting away. I told them: "Look, I have had a terrible

nightmare about some mad person in a mask going in a building and just killing

people. It felt so real". They were speechless or did not know what to say other

than: "It was just a bad dream". But I knew from my long experience, at least

intuitively, it was not just another bad dream.

Two days later I heard a news report of a terrorist act at a technical college at

Kerch, in the Crimea, where an explosion and mass shooting had occurred.

Eighteen had been reported dead and many wounded. Then the number of

the dead slowly rose to 21 dead and 50 wounded. I pray that the death toll

does not rise.

I, and other Russians wondered how this could have happened. I mean, this

is Russia, not America! However, this attack in an educational institution is

far from being unprecedented. On the 15th January two youths with knives

broke into a school cabinet and attacked school children, at Perm school

number 127, on the 19th of January a 15 year old boy attacked students

and a teacher with an ax at school number 5 in Sosnovi Bor in Buryati,

and on the 18th April a youth tried to attack a first year student and

teacher and  to set fire to the school. I have spoken to school

students in Moscow who told me one fellow school student tried to blow

up his school but did not injure anyone . His teachers became terrified of

him. But the latest attack was unprecedented in the mass scale of the

victims as well as ferocity.

Many Russians are asking themselves : "How could this have happened?"

and "How did an 18 year old manage to casually purchase 150 rounds as

well as obtain a licence for a gun ?" And how could such a madman break

through a strong security cordon which has a metal detector, surveillance

cameras and security men?" According to some reports, the metal detector

was not working.

All the evidence points to a strange reclusive loner who largely kept to himself

and held a very negative view of the world. A teacher, Alexander  Monseeko,

who tried to help the boy by persuading the boy to see the world in a different

way turned out to be one of the victims. So some teachers may have been

uneasy about the behavior of this boy. The 18 year old youth, Vladislav

Roslyakov, seemed to be absorbed in shooter computer games, adored guns

and admired Americans who walked into schools and carried out mass killings.

He even told a fellow college student that, "Such acts where  a person goes

into school, kills many and himself are a great class act. I 'd like to do this."

His fellow student thought nothing of it . He thought it was just "Words, words

and words.'' I mean how many kids do you hear making such outrageous

remarks just to draw attention to them? It was not taken seriously. Nevertheless,

this act had been meticulously planned in advance. It may be no accident that

the killer changed into the clothes, which an American Killer had worn during

a mass shooting in a Columbia High School in America {in 1999 two youth

attacked a school killing 13 and wounding 23 students and teachers}.

Could those killings have been prevented? A famous Criminologist and

Psychiatrist, Mikhail Vinogradov, stated in a recent interview : "Here you need

deeper and  more attentive observation. In schools, we need to bring back

good psychologists by offering them decent pay ". In this regard, few would

disagree. However, psychologists are available in only 50% of Russian schools

as they have been cut back. Not only have they been cut back, but officials

have even attacked them in public for being badly trained or inept much as

teachers have come under relentless criticism. Their pay is even lower than

school teachers and they often do only part time work. There is just one

psychologist available for 600 to 800 children! In fact, perhaps most Russian

school children are unaware that they can approach a psychologist to get

help. It is often a best kept secret!

I asked a school teacher, linguist and psychologist, Anna , 31, what

she thought of the events in Kerch . Anna answered: "I worked in the

Psychology service at school as part of my practice. .. Most psychologists

are marginalized in many Russian schools. I recall from my own experience

at school of how psychologists gave us tests, but we never found out the results.

If I had problems speaking to other pupils I was unaware that I could go to a

psychologist and talk about it. Nobody told us the service of  a psychologist

was available. It was funny and strange. Yet psychological counselling can

do a lot. Stress has been increasing in schools because parents are pushing

kids into doing all kinds of activities. I don't think this is the best thing to do.

They often lack time to speak to them and they just come home, eat and do

their homework. If you compare this with Soviet times, at least children

could take part in clubs and be part of communities ... Now the stress is much

worse for genetically disposed children to mental distress such as bipolar

depression. They can have problems with this new stress and their illness

can be triggered off. Children get so pressurized they can  turn to suicide."

"How would you explain what happened in Kerch?"

"I think it is a kind of rebellion against the system. If you can remember when

you were a teenager you often felt the world was against you . You have this

hatred against everything and everyone. You have those problems and you

feel powerless to fix this.You feel so powerless that you want to scream and

tell adults that you are not living up to things. So teenagers feel adults are

either liars or hypocrites. Only now at 31, I realize that this is not always the

case. Teenagers feel that adults don't pay attention to them. I noticed at

school that when other pupils were picking on other pupils, teachers would

ignore it. It can be explained by the fact that teachers are also under

pressure and don't have the time, or resources. They have too many things

to do. This is really the psychologist's job to find out what is going on. What

I realized is that schools resemble a military structure. When I took part as

a judge in a poetry competition last year ... I found that as many as 70%

of poems glorified war claiming it was good to kill the enemy and die for

your country, 20% thought that war was horrible but you need to remember the

great deeds of our past and only 10% war was horrible and we by no means,

should try to repeat it. I felt a complete alien in this school competition.

Would it not be a great idea if teachers would teach children on how to

avoid war and control aggression rather than glorify it?"

We need to address the wider issues of how society seems to glorify

and encourage aggressive behavior in so many areas of our lives such

as in games, films and even schools. A Professor of Psychology at

Moscow State University, Alexander Asmolov, stated, "We are living in a country

where hatred is incited every day . The country lives in a situation where they

believe there is a big conspiracy against them."