The problem of increasing offenses among young people has become too actual. More often media and social networks spread information about fights, irresponsible attitudes toward education, home-based escapes and vagrancy, extortion, teenage vandalism, theft of vehicles, school boiling, alcohol and drug use, etc. Psychologists say that psyche of Ukrainian children has experienced irreversible changes over the last decade: most of them fear nothing, do not appreciate anything and do not believe in anything. They are becoming more brutal, and their actions are more frightening. Deviant behavior prevents individual from successful socialization, and subsequently it can go into open-ended criminal forms and endanger both the person of the minor and society as a whole. The reasons for this phenomenon are those negative processes that have been taking place in the state over the past decades: – economical (decreasing of living standards, high unemployment rate, presence of military conflict in the east part of the country, stratification of society, relative availability of alcohol and drug substances); – cultural (creation of associations in which the concept of effective conflict resolution is cultivated, leveling of moral values, spreading of thieves' subculture, creation of so-called “death groups” through social networks, gaming); – pedagogical (increasing the number of socially neglected families, problems with education, lack of free out-of-school educational institutions, etc.). To overcome such a phenomenon as deviant behavior of minors is completely impossible without a systemic policy of the state. There should be a system of measures implemented in the following areas: – legal education of the population, sharing information on problem solving in the legislative field in order to prevent the juvenile transition to a criminal way of activity; – branch of a network of public and educational organizations that provide leisure and provide free comprehensive psychological and pedagogical, medical and social assistance to minors who need it; – providing the employment of minors who do not continue their studies and their facilitating in labor adaptation; – improvement of the environment in which the minor is; – providing the effective participation of the family in minors’ upbringing.

Key words: minors, peculiarities of minors’ age development, deviant behavior, manifestations of deviant behavior, prevention of deviant behavior.

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