Ukrainian Students' Analysis of Abuse Treatment by Parents: Retrospective and Perspective in Virtual and Real Environments

Given the prevalence of violence in Ukrainian families, measures to prevent parental abusive treatment against children are urgent. It is important to study today's youth awareness about violence within families in order to enhance a culture of engagement with spouses and children in future. The aim of the study is to examine students' reflective experiences and their attitudes towards forms, frequency, causes and effects of parental abusive treatment. During the research the following methods were used step-by-step: theoretical analyses of scientific resources, anonymous questionnaire, quantitative and correlation analyses. According to result of survey 98 students who were interviewed, none of them fell victim of sexual abuse in their families. However, more than a half (51%) of the students surveyed experienced some forms of parental physical punishment. All the interviewed students encountered psychological cases of parental violence. The mostprevalent forms of parental abuse among the interviewees are criticism, negative comparison, emotional detachment, arrogance, intimidation, blackmail and humiliation. The most prevalent consequences of parental abuse among students are anxiety, low self-esteem, insecurity, impatience, suspiciousness, constraint in communication. Students agree that budget limitations, forced labor, criticism, spanking, emotional detachment, ignoring type of communication, reproach, blackmail are acceptable methods of punishment to use when raising their own children. These results clearly demonstrate the problem of the impact of parental abuse on children and its consequences in the future. A virtual dimension of the actualized problem is considered, namely: - virtualization of aggression and cruelty in the postmodern world. - the level of determining the factor of cruelty from the space of virtual culture. - the mirror image of everyday cruelty in the virtual environment; - the phenomenon of video games as a source and context of representation of the factor of cruelty in behavioral realities; - cybercrime as a virtualized result of cruelty in family and everyday realities. - futurological perspectives of virtualization of cruelty in communicative culture in general and in family relations in particular. The postmodern world is fundamentally different from the traditions and culture of the past, primarily due to the development of computer technologies and the virtualization of life in general. So, for example, virtual communities have become, in a certain way, another world, a second reality of life in general. And certain behavioral factors, in particular cruelty in the private environment, became a projection of such a phenomenon as cybercrime. Video games are a unique modern phenomenon, which multipolarly absorb all facets of human potential, communicative tendencies, behavioral and characterological factors, from the warmth of interpersonal relationships to the extreme degree of cruelty.