Social-psychological reasons for the spread of the“AUE” subculture (hidden factors of the problem)

The article identifies the deep causes of the new wave of minors’ criminalization in the Russian society. The authors considered the expert opinions on this issue and found them inconsistent; described the main forms of behavior associated with the adoption of criminal values - primary, game, and re-criminalization which usually have different social localization; summarized the historical aspects of adolescent criminalization in the Russian society and its social-cultural factors. Based on the analysis of the official statistics and the results of the empirical studies conducted in 2019-2020 within the project “Deep causes of teenage (neo)criminalization in contemporary Russia” supported by the RFBR, the authors assess the scale of real and virtual criminalization, features of legal outlook, social-psychological well-being, and worldview of criminalized and ‘ordinary’ teenagers. In addition to the traditionally identified causes of criminalization (social-economic and cultural-educational inequality, deprivation, territorial-geographical specificity, etc.), the authors consider social-cultural factors: first, violations in socialization and child-parental relations - as leading to the deprivation of the need for love and recognition of minors by their parents and to the attempts to compensate this deprivation destructively, with criminal practices; second, the types of minors’ heroes, which determine the normative and gender inversion and the spread of the criminal subculture - as a source of the surrogate pseudo-masculine discourse. The authors make a conclusion that the prevention of minors’ criminalization should be based on psychological-pedagogical and social-cultural technologies, the main actors of which are the family, school and state information policy, while the normative-legal technologies of social control, the actors of which are administrative and law enforcement agencies, should focus on the crime-deterrent function.