They filmed a drowning man on their phone, but they didn’t help: teenage indifference during wartime (video)
The full-scale war that Ukrainian children have been experiencing since 2022 should have taught them the value of human life, compassion, and willingness to help others. However, numerous events recorded in real life and social media cast doubt on this expected effect. In war conditions, when adults and children read daily news about death, destruction, injuries, the formation of empathy does not always happen naturally. On the contrary, in some teenagers there is a decrease in the level of sensitivity to other people’s pain, alienation, aggressiveness or indifference disguised as “normal”. Behavior that would have seemed shocking a few years ago is now perceived as another interesting video that the user will watch and move on to the next one.
This is exactly what happened on May 10 in Dnipro. A group of teenagers – two girls and a boy aged 13-14 years – calmly filmed a man who was drowning in a reservoir of a quarry in the Cherveny Kamin housing estate. The person was in the water at a distance of about seven meters from the shore, and needed immediate help. However, none of the teenagers called emergency services, approached adults, or made any attempt to help or even report the incident.
The video, published on social networks, caused a flurry of outrage. Most users paid attention not only to the fact of shooting, but also to an emotionally neutral or even amused reaction behind the scenes. Instead of fear, anxiety, attempts to stop the tragedy, silent observation and recording on the phone. The body of a 67-year-old man, as later reported by the police, was taken out of the water already dead. The cause of death is drowning.
The man’s body was brought to shore with the help of diving equipment and a rope. Rescuers arrived at the scene only after outside witnesses reported the incident. Until this moment, the man was not helped, and the time that could have saved his life was lost.
The Dnipro police are operational established the identities of the children who filmed the video. They were not registered, had no violations, and come from prosperous families. The law enforcement officers reported that based on this fact, the issue of opening criminal proceedings under Art. 136 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (failure to provide assistance to a person in a life-threatening condition). The final decision on criminal responsibility will be made after analyzing all the circumstances.
Psychologists point to a complex and ambiguous reason for this behavior, noting that the long-term stress and information overload associated with war can lead to an emotional shutdown. A child who lives for a long time in conditions of anxiety, news of death, loses the ability to instantly react to someone else’s misfortune. The mechanism of “emotional shutdown” is activated – a protective reaction of the psyche. Added to this is the bystander effect: everyone thinks that someone else will help, someone else will take responsibility.
The behavior of adolescents in this case is a symptom of a wider process. Some teenagers in Ukraine, especially in cities under constant threat of shelling, show increased rigidity, cynicism, loss of boundaries between reality and virtuality. Filming events on camera instead of interfering in them has become the norm for many. Video capture is the first impulse, not compassion or action. This is due to both the pressure of the digital environment and the deformation of moral guidelines, which was exacerbated by the war.
Social responsibility in adolescence is formed not only in the family, but also in the educational environment, in the media field, in the communities to which the child belongs. And if these environments are also filled with apathy, anxiety, and frustration, then it is difficult to expect that children will be able to act differently from the adults who surround them. In this context, crime is not only what is done. This is also what has not been done.
The event in Dnipro has not yet received a final legal evaluation, but it is an alarming signal. The war intensified the sense of fear, made many teenagers withdrawn, emotionally exhausted or, on the contrary, demonstrably indifferent. Their reaction in extreme situations is increasingly determined not by ethical ideas, but by the habit of visual fixation and observation. For many children, the war, which should have taught them to appreciate life, became a background to everyday life. And this is one of the most disturbing consequences of the long conflict, about which society must speak honestly before it is too late.
