Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The internet creates a virtual space where individuals strive to capture their dreams, art, and culture. Within it, one can find the greatness and dignity of humanity, but also the baseness and wickedness that signify the decline of the spirit. The internet has drastically diminished the significance of space and distance in social interactions. It has enabled the crossing of temporal boundaries, provided anonymity in contacts, and facilitated access to previously inaccessible information, including open educational resources and sources of cultures different from one’s own. The language of digital media is a system of signs. Without understanding them, contemporary individuals become slaves, and their lives become meaningless and purposeless play. Illiteracy and low computer and media literacy can become sources of social and cultural manipulation on an unprecedented scale. Information networks connect not only universities, businesses, and people, but they have also become tools for playing out cultural, social, economic, political rivalries, as well as criminal and terrorist activities, and more recently, military actions. The COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have their dramatic images in the real world, but also in cyberspace. This article fills a gap in this area by addressing the issues of misinformation, media manipulation, propaganda, and infodemics. It presents a classification of security threats to children, youth, and adults and describes selected initiatives undertaken in this regard by the European Union. The author draws upon humanistic and social thought, pointing out avenues for analysis and ways to counteract negative consequences.

The family is a basic society unit, which provides a sense of security, love and belonging for all its members, especially children. The responsibility for the development and upbringing of the children lies with the parents. However, in a situation when a parent is incarcerated for various reasons the threats for personal emotional security increase due to disruption of contacts with relatives which is typical consequence both for parents and children. The parent’s stay in penitentiary isolation results in a significant weakening or breaking of the parental bond and contacts with the closest relatives. It is therefore stressed that maintaining contact with the family is important both for persons deprived of their liberty themselves and for their loved ones. Maintaining contact with the children is considered to be one of the most important protective factors against committing another offence and the consequent incarceration. Children brought up in families where one parent is in prison experience social and emotional disorders. Author stress that the separation of a parent and child as a consequence of parent incarceration lowers the level of self-esteem, self-acceptance, evokes a sense of shame and leads to social isolation of the child. In order to improve family relations and maintain contacts, the Prison Service should provide a number of programmes for incarcerated parents, whose main objective is to strengthen parenting skills.

Securitisation is an intersubjective process of construing new categories or subcategories of security by identifying existential threats, the alleviation of which requires extraordinary measures and social acceptance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both during the near-total lockdown, as well as in the period where restrictions were loosened, the messages presented in public space, calling for specific behaviours, displayed certain signs of this process – the limitation of citizens’ rights without the introduction of a state of emergency, as provided for by law, was carried out on the grounds of an extraordinary threat (threat of infection, illness or even death) the eradication of which requires extraordinary measures (depriving citizens of the possibility of moving, working, learning, taking advantage of entertainment or pursuing their passions, as well as imposing an order to wear masks and maintaining social distance) to be applied, which ˜– on the one hand – were introduced under the pain of punishment, while on the other, they were supposed to be met with general acceptance as rational and just. The following paper presents the results of a study of communications appearing in the public space in the period from March to August 2020 in Poland, which were to support the process of securitisation of the pandemic threat.

It is argued that the assessment of the security level of the bank lending activities should be made taking into account the socio-economic interests of all participants in the credit process. The developed methodology of the score assessment of the security level of credit operations of the bank includes not only an analysis of the security status of the credit operations of a particular bank, but also an assessment of the external conditions of its implementation. The process of assessment of the security level of the bank credit operations is implemented in five stages: the development of a system of security indicators for the bank credit operations; formation of the information base, which consists of bank reporting (financial and managerial) and macroeconomic indicators; analysis of security indicators; preparation of the report on the state of security; advising on adjustment of the bank’s policy to enhance security of credit operations and prevent the effects of possible threats. The introduction of a methodology for scoring in the practical activities of banks will allow to obtain objective characteristics of the security of credit operations, identify weaknesses, strengthen security measures, improve the bank’s credit policy to prevent the effects of possible threats.

Financial globalization created an environment for structured product development in financial markets. With the help of these instruments it is possible to transform an asset into a new investment vehicle, that opens new investment possibilities for risk averse investors, along with those investors who are searching for higher yield. This paper analyses different structured products and their influence on investment management using ratio analysis, Markowitz portfolio optimization model and Monte Carlo simulation. Analysis revealed that structured products have a significant positive effect on investment management on diversification and yield enhancement sides.