How protest? Statistics against the Duma

The bill, punishing for the involvement of minors in inconsistent public actions, was the result of speculations around rallies organized by the support groups of Alexei Navalny: supposedly adolescents are almost the main power of the current protest. We calculated the average age of the alleged participants in Navalny’s shares and found out: most likely minors among them are less than 15%.

“Puchechnaya meat: Alexei Navalny uses children for his own profit” - such headings regularly appear in the pro -government press due to mass shares that organize support groups throughout the country. So the authorities are trying to make it clear to society that schoolchildren are those people on whom the current protest is being held. Starting from the first mass action organized by Navalny - March 26, 2017 - schoolchildren are summoned to the authorities , they conduct conversations in educational institutions (both representatives of the administration andemployees of centers for counteracting extremism ). The crown of this activity should be a new part of Article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses that punishes the fine or arrest of the organizers of the inconsistent shares, if they “involved” the children into participation in them. The corresponding bill remains to adopt the Federation Council and sign - the president.

The ATS-Info managed to collect approximate data on the age of the alleged participants in the shares of Alexei Navalny on June 12, 2017 . To do this, we used open data on the participants of 193 “meetings” on the VKontakte social network devoted to shares throughout Russia (the data collection was held in June 2017). Events were held in 154 cities under the slogan “We require answers”. The difference between the number of “meetings” that we analyzed and the number of cities where the shares took place is explained by the fact that part of the “meetings” united people who planned to participate in shares in larger settlements.

Like the shares of March 26, the protests on June 12 were directed against corruption. Navalny proposed to get an answer from the authorities in connection with the revealing film of his fund about the property of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In total, more than 98 thousand people gathered in the country, according to organizers, journalists and participants. Beating and unlawful detention of participants by police were recorded. More than 1,700 people got into the police departments . In 46 police departments, employees committed at least 109 serious violations of the law. In the 33rd department of St. Petersburg in the premises with detainees, police officers sprayed tear gas.

In total, 142577 users of VK registered in the "meetings" dedicated to the shares. On average, for all groups, the number of people who indicated the age is 40%. Of course, these data cannot unequivocally prove the dominance of any of the age groups among protests-for example, users can indicate inaccurate information about themselves in profiles. But even despite the reservations, this information can give some idea of ​​the composition of people who publicly declared their desire to participate in shares on June 12, 2017.

What we managed to find out

The average age of the participants in “meetings” in the overwhelming number of cases is from 24 to 27 years. Based on the data we received, the number of minors on average is approximately 12%. In most "meetings" their number does not exceed 15%. In more than forty groups of such people - less than 10%.

In cities where the number of potential participants in the action is more than a thousand, the percentage of minors is rarely higher than 15%, and, in general, the larger the number of subscribers, the lower this percentage. In the most “protest” cities - Moscow and St. Petersburg (the northern capital in the list takes first place), the only ones where the total number of people who are allegedly ready to participate in shares exceeded 10 thousand, the percentage of minors is 11.37 and 6.07, respectively.

In 11 cities there are no minors, the number of participants in these groups in only one case exceeds 20 people (Konakovo, Tver region). At the same time, the minimum age of more than half of the remaining cases is 13 years old. The oldest one - 17 and a half and above - ready to protest minors in Severomorsk (Murmansk region), Kuvandyka (Orenburg region), Vyatskiye Polyany (Kirov region) and Zhukovsky near Moscow.

As previously managed to establish, the number of minors among the detainees on June 12, 2012 is approximately 6% of the total.