Attention: English is not my native
language, the text is translated with the help of technical means of
translation. I apologize in advance if the meaning of some phrases will be
transferred incorrectly.
(continued, Part 1 here)
In this case, the shift in tactics
of the extremists behind the creation and activities of «Red Dolphin», «Blue
Whale» and similar communities already contains a serious vulnerability for
criminals and it can be used against them.
The point is that the main
difference between «Red Dolphin» and «Blue Whale»
is that in the new scenario of the «Game» the teenager participating in it has
to perform tasks of «curators», the essence of which is committing illegal
acts, but not against himself (as it was in «Blue Whale»), but against other
persons or organizations. The tasks are different, such as damaging or
destroying property, causing offensive actions or light injuries to other
people.
At the first stage, these tasks
are insignificant in their consequences, for example, insulting inscriptions on
walls, breaking a window, burning letters in the mailbox, damaging the wheel of
a car, pouring water or safe but unpleasant liquids or mud on random people,
verbal abuse, ridicule, knocking a hat off the head and similar minor offenses.
In the second stage, the tasks
become more complicated, as well as the degree of their public danger,
teenagers must commit more serious offenses, such as burning cars or buildings,
killing animals, causing moderate or more severe injuries to random people,
using illegal but dangerous weapons (pneumatic, cold, traumatic, percussion,
gas, homemade).
In the third stage, the
participant passes the «Point of No Return», these are tasks related to the
category of serious offenses, such as injuring other people, but doing it in a
hidden form, for example: pushing under a passing car or train, from a bridge
or window, damaging railroad tracks or subways, burning buildings with people,
children's or medical facilities.
At all three stages, offenses
should be committed with video recording of what is happening on camera,
records of completed tasks, teenagers should send to their «curators» through
closed communities in social networks and messengers. In fact, the teenagers
themselves shoot compromising materials, which they are subsequently
blackmailed with if they try to leave the “Game” and refuse from illegal
actions.
The fourth stage, aka the last
one, is a mass murder, followed by the suicide of the perpetrator. Given the
age of the participants, the place of the last act is usually chosen to be the
school they attend, the likely victims are the immediate neighborhood, their
classmates and teachers.
Once again I repeat what I said in
the first part: that it was participation in the extremist community “Red Dolphin”
that caused the two attacks on schools that took place in September 2024 in the
Russian cities of Chelyabinsk
and Balagansk is only an assumption. There is no direct evidence of this
version published in the official media. Law enforcement agencies do not
officially confirm this fact, but they do not deny it either. In spite of this,
I consider that extremist community type «Red Dolphin» or «Blue Whale»,
represents the direct and obvious threat to the safety of people, especially
children. This means that it is necessary to be proactive by developing a
tactical scheme to counter this threat, with measures to both prevent and
suppress direct attacks.
Prevention:
This work should be divided into 3
key areas, and perform tasks in parallel, only in this case the prevention of
the threat will be effective:
1 direction - identification of
potential victims:
The very scenario of the «deadly
quest», which the organizers of these extremist communities impose on their
victims, contains a serious vulnerability, which, if used correctly, will allow
to quickly identify and stop teenagers drawn into destructive activities. As I
have already written above, the scenario provides for the passage of 4 stages,
with the execution of tasks with increasing complexity and the level of public
danger, these violations must be recorded on video and committed publicly, and
this is the vulnerability. The fact is that the network of criminals, as a
rule, fall into the hands of children, previously to such offenses are not
prone to such misconduct, who have not committed offenses and have not
previously had a record in the police.
According to psychologists, to
whom I asked for comments on this situation, the fulfillment of the final task,
namely, mass murder followed by suicide of the perpetrator, is impossible
without the prior fulfillment of the first three stages. Because it is precisely
during the fulfillment of a chain of tasks with a gradual increase in
complexity and the degree of public danger that a teenager forms and consolidates
an obsession with committing a mass murder with suicide. By committing serious
crimes at the penultimate stage, the child passes a kind of «point of no return».
In addition, recording the committed offenses on video (which is a mandatory
condition for participation) and providing it as a report to their supervisors,
gives them additional leverage for blackmail and other forms of psychological
pressure on the participant, if he suddenly decides to refuse to perform the
final task and stop the «death quest».
This feature can be used to
quickly identify potential mass murderers, even at the stage of preparation for
the crime. How exactly to do this? In the first turn most closely attention to
teenage (main object group 12 - 16 years), behavior of which dramatically
changed without any grounds.
A clear signal that the teenager
may have fallen under the external control of a destructive community is that
the child, up to this point, in character: uncommunicative, shy (according to
psychologists, the most prone to such influence is a teenager with such
personality characteristics as: passive introvert sensitive type, melancholic),
obedient, suddenly, begins to commit uncharacteristic actions and minor
offenses, to explain the motives of which, he can not or does not want to. In
this case it is necessary to connect to the work of specialists, children's
psychologists, social pedagogues, psychologists-criminals.
I am sure that for specialized
specialists, it will not be difficult to establish a link between changes in
the teenager's behavior and the extremist community (if there really was one).
If this connection is established, then representatives of police services and
other law enforcement agencies should be involved in the situation. At the same
time, the work of psychologists and social pedagogues with the child and his
family should not stop here; it is important to establish and eliminate the
circumstances that prompted the teenager to turn to a destructive community. In
addition, the study of each such case will allow a more detailed understanding
of the methods used by criminals to involve children in extremist groups. The
systematization and analysis of such information will make it possible to
develop more effective mechanisms for identifying cases of «external management»
of teenagers' behavior and more effective counteraction to such crimes.
Who should do this? This is a
complex task that should involve all those who are directly or indirectly
related to children at risk. These are, first of all, parents and guardians of
children, teachers and school staff, coaches of sports clubs, children's
doctors, police officers and security and safety officers of educational
institutions, even school bus drivers. All these people need to know what
external signs and deviations in the child's behavior to pay attention to and
who to contact. Accordingly, a clear algorithm of interdepartmental interaction
should be developed, on the basis of which a normative document defining the
form and procedure of such response should be adopted. The measures taken should
be of both public and non-public nature, using the full, permissible arsenal of
means of behavioral correction.
2 direction - information safety:
Involvement of teenagers in
destructive communities in most cases occurs according to one of two schemes:
1. active (initiative) - a child
independently (using links from other resources, hashtags or special phrases
for search queries) finds an extremist community in social networks or
messengers, applies to join, undergoes identification (in some groups it is a
rather complicated and long process, in several stages) after which he or she
is assigned a «curator» who begins to give him or her tasks and exercise
control until the final stage;
2. passive - the teenager places
certain hashtags on his social network page, to which the «curators»
(recruiters) of destructive communities react and get in touch with him. The
rest is the same as in the first scheme: identification, fixation of the «curator2,
and fulfillment of tasks.
To build a system of information
counteraction, it is necessary to first reach an agreement between the owners
of social networks and messengers on how to block such communities and
accounts. The unlawfulness of the actions of such communities or individuals is
obvious. In the criminal legislation of any country, involving minors in
illegal activities and leading them to suicide is a crime. However, any crime
or at least criminal intent must be proven. For this purpose, lawyers of police
services or other law enforcement agencies should develop special «Protocols
for prompt response to threats to information security»* to establish,
collect and document the circumstances confirming the criminal intentions of
administrators of communities or account owners who disseminate such
information. I would like to clarify that this protocol means collecting
evidence not to bring charges or criminal charges, but to block the source of
extremist information. It is important to stop the spread of destructive information,
to deprive extremists of a tool to control children's behavior. Although let us
be objective, it will not be possible to completely deprive criminals of the
opportunity to recruit new victims, it is quite realistic to seriously
complicate this process for them.
* Ideally, if such protocols are developed in an
international format (because this threat has long since become an
international threat and the level of its danger continues to grow), with a
unified form and procedure of application. By introducing their use
through international law enforcement organizations, such as special bodies of
the UN Security Council or Interpol, it could significantly increase the
effectiveness of countering this threat worldwide.
The most important thing for an
information safety strategy is that it must be offensive. Law enforcement
agencies and departments of education, guardianship and custody of children
should actively monitor information resources, both independently and within
the framework of appeals from concerned citizens. Identify destructive
resources, conduct checks, document the criminal intentions (if any) of their
owners and, within the framework of the above-mentioned information security
protocols, apply all available legal tools to block them promptly. If
technically and legally possible, prosecute those who create and administer
Internet resources with destructive content.
3. Continuous
monitoring, forecasting and modeling of probable threats
This task should be mostly
performed by expert analysts of law enforcement agencies. Both incoming
information about events that have actually already taken place and probable
threats should be considered. The first and second line of prevention measures
must be constantly adjusted to reflect the changing situation.
Once countermeasures have been
introduced, criminals change tactics quite quickly, so it is important not only
to react to their current actions, but also to predict their possible moves. On
the basis of such forecasts, it is important to develop and implement
preventive measures to prevent and suppress their possible actions.
The optimal solution would be to
create such an information and analytical group on a permanent basis in an
international format.
Defense against direct attacks.
Despite all measures to anticipate
and prevent likely threats, direct attempts to carry out mass killings cannot
be avoided. Unfortunately, to date there is no security system with 100%
efficiency. All existing methods of prediction and prevention of such threats
can only reduce to an acceptable limit both the probability of such attacks and
the damage caused by them, and minimize the number of possible victims.
It is impossible to describe in
one article
how to prevent and suppress attempts of mass murder in schools, other
educational institutions, as well as places where children are present in large
numbers. This is a very broad research topic, which I am currently finalizing
and will soon begin work on a project devoted to this very issue. This is a
complex, multi-level system of prevention and counteraction to both existing
and future threats to the security of educational institutions. I made my first
attempt to develop such a model back in 2019 and described it in this article,
which was subsequently updated several times. The new project will be much more
extensive and will contain more concrete measures and proposals, but these are
only future plans for now.
Conclusion:
I believe that extremist ideology
and the destructive communities «Blue Whale» and «Red Dolphin» that have emerged on its basis are links
in the same chain, a long-term criminal plot. This criminal plan pursues the
goal of creating a system of «remotely controlled mass murders» committed by
teenagers, followed by the suicide of the perpetrator, and what we are
witnessing today is a kind of experiment to test the efficiency of this system.
The reality shows that, unfortunately, the system works. I don't know who is
behind it and what purpose they pursue, and to be honest I am not really
interested in it, my task is applied.
The situation also indicates not
only the emergence of a new threat, but also the emergence of a new, third type
of criminal who commits mass murders in educational institutions. Previously,
we have dealt with two main types of criminals, divided by their motivation:
1. «School shooter» - for him mass
murder is a way of self-expression, he is guided only by his understandable
goals and tries to convey to others only his personal message.
2. «Terrorist» - commits a crime
guided by a specific ideology and pursues the goals that this extremist
ideology (or terrorist organization or movement) professes.
A new, third type, I would call «Controlled
Suicide», his goal is to fulfill the task of the «curator», whose identity and
true motives he does not know, and then kill himself.
Unfortunately, this way of
committing mass murder is quite attractive for terrorist and other radical
extremist organizations, which will obviously try to develop it and use it for
their criminal purposes in the near future.
I would be glad to hear the
opinion of colleagues on this issue, write in the comments to the post or in
private messages. All ways to contact me are in the signature.
Author - Roman Grishin
#threat #children #school #kindergarten
#college #university #terrorism #criminal #destructive #extremism #murder #suicide #BlueWhale #Blue_Whale #RedDolphin #Red_Dolphin #SafeandSoundSchools #SchoolSafety
