Introduction. The massacres in schools and colleges committed by their students are initially associated with the United States, but in recent decades the phenomenon has spread to other countries including Russia. Such tragedies affecting children and adolescents are of particular interest to politicians, general public and professionals.

The Objective of this research is to summarize the foreign literature accounts of the phenomenon of mass school murders, the structure of this phenomenon, the stages of its development and factors that cause it.

Procedure. Research methodology included search and generalization of conclusions from scientific and applied publications on the issue. The search was carried out using bibliographic systems and scientific networks Web of Knowledge, Scopus, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, Mendeley. He author selected 55 scientific publications on specific cases and meta-analysis of data aimed at addressing socio-psychological factors of school shootings and prevention.

Findings. The main methodological approaches to the analysis of school shootings are described, the theories offering a systematic understanding of this phenomenon are presented, the stages of both social and personal predictors of school shootings are defined.

Conclusion. The analysis of the literature allows interpreting massacres in schools as an independent phenomenon, to reconstruct the events, to determine the main mechanisms and development stages, to offer effective ways to detect and prevent threats.

One of the fundamental factors influencing an individual’s intent to emigrate is a sense of danger that triggers the decision on settling in another country. The intent to emigrate under modern conditions is decision making in the situation of choice and is determined by perceptions of one’s own security. Security of a person is the matter of his/her own efforts. Thus security is one of the leading factors of orientation and determination in the course of obtaining the notion of the outer world.

263 respondents aged from 20 to 40 participated in the study. Four groups of respondents (those with emigration intentions and with a sense of security; the ones lacking emigration intentions and with a sense of security; respondents with emigration intentions, with a feeling of being in danger; respondents lacking emigration intentions with a feeling of being in danger) were formed on the basis of two criteria: emigration intentions and a feeling of being secure/insecure. The results show that the most significant motives for changing the settling area are life standards and search for comfort, which is explained by a pronounced dissatisfaction with social and economic situation of the native land, and low income. It is identified that the groups mentioned differ in their social psychological characteristics of life satisfaction level, sense of happiness, sense of security, motives for possible emigration, concept of emigration. The contradiction between the stated positive attitude towards those who emigrate (“a person can live where he likes”) and the semantic meaning of the “Emigration” concept (“cowardice”, “attenuation of a state”, “escape”, “rats deserting the sinking ship”) was detected in all groups of the respondents.