Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

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.

The wider awareness and recognition of human security threats has developed over the last several decades. Spurred on by globalization, greater human mobility, global media, economic interconnectedness and technological advancements, the securitization of non-military security threats have deepened and widened security discourses. The percieved risk posed by truly global threats have resulted in new international regimes and cooperation, national governments have reevaluated their national security strategies, and grassroots movements have revealed and mobileized individuals around the world to action. Global health security threats, and in particular, pandemic diseases, are one just one of many threats currently facing the global community that has the potential to envoke fear and feelings of insecurity and panic, particularly when securitized through twenty four hour news networks and social media. The purpose of this study is to explore the securitization process of a health security threat, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and risk perceptions of individuals living in a global city geographically distant from the outbreak. This study reports the findings from interviews with eleven individuals based in the United Arab Emirates to explore their individual risk perceptions of the outbreak of the Ebola virus, and to understand how information about the outbreak was obtained, processed and consequently construed by these individuals. The findings suggested that with the increasing securitization of diseases, individual risk perceptions of the 2014 Ebola outbreak were a reflection of a variety of discourses concerning the security issue at the national and global levels. Therefore, in light of the increasing emergence and re-emergence of pandemic diseases and transborder global threats, it is important to consider individual perceptions of the threats and the influence of government, media (traditional and social media), and individual experiences in a global and interconnected world.