After a series of recent stabbing incidents, posts warning of violent crimes have been spreading online, continuing despite the police’s strict punishment policy.
Most of the suspects caught by the police are teenagers and say it was a prank, but experts agree that it is not a problem that can be easily overlooked.
Some analyzes say that youth isolation and weakening of community spirit should be approached as a social pathology.
Reporter Kang Min-kyung reports.
[Reporter]
Despite the police’s strict punishment policy, posts threatening to use weapons are still appearing on social media .
As of the 30th of last month, the number of people who wrote posts warning of violent crimes arrested by the police was 240.
Most of them say in police investigations that they posted the murder notice as a joke or because they wanted to get attention.
What is the psychology of the writers who put citizens in fear?
Experts point to the craving for attention.
Approximately half (41%) of the suspects in the knife attack warnings who had been arrested by the end of last month were teenagers.
This is a generation that mostly uses SNS and enjoys online 토토사이트play culture called ‘ meme ‘ or ‘challenge ‘ .
They say they lightly regard posts warning of knife attacks as a ‘challenge’, that is, as a means of getting attention.
Additionally, experts say that due to their strong individualism, they do not seriously consider the fear of others and the social damage that murder warning posts can cause.
[Seung Jae-hyun / Senior Researcher, Korea Institute for Criminal Justice Policy: Just as adults used to report 112 or 119 on April Fool’s Day, they turn the posts in the online space into a prank among themselves.] Socially isolated
youth Some point out that it is becoming a crooked ‘escape’.
As attention to indiscriminate crime increases, a kind of ‘attention competition’ is taking place, with people wanting to show off their influence and have their presence confirmed, even in negative ways.
Experts advise that in the short term, it is important to instill awareness in those who post murder warnings that they may be punished.
[Bae Sang-hoon / Profiler, Professor of Police Administration, Woosuk University: You probably thought you wouldn’t get caught, of course. Because it’s never been like that before. We are paying attention to you, but if you go a little more positively, we can go together, and if you deviate from this, we need to instill in children the awareness that punishment is possible… .]
However, it should be noted that this phenomenon shows the social pathology of vulnerable groups such as ‘reclusive loners’.
It appears that it is time to consider long-term measures to restore the social community, such as understanding the actual situation of isolated youth.
This is Kang Min-kyung.