The concept of mental belonging of the digital generation: criminological features

<jats:p>&lt;p style="text-align: justify;"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Context and relevance.&lt;/strong&gt; Criminologically, the concept of the mental belonging of the digital generation is substantiated in the context of the transformation of social institutions and the priority of digital tools in the socialization of the personality of modern minors. &lt;strong&gt;The purpose&lt;/strong&gt; of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the influence of information globalization on the mentality of minors who accept the collective consciousness of individual social groups as their own in the context of the development of its destructiveness using the example of specific forms of digital deviations. &lt;strong&gt;Hypothesis.&lt;/strong&gt; The mental affiliation of the digital generation is the acceptance by a minor of the collective mentality of a particular social group as his own, which helps a person integrate into this social group and determine his place in it and beyond, in the context of digital information globalization. &lt;strong&gt;Methods and materials.&lt;/strong&gt; The connection between the concept of mental belonging and theories of social identity, self-categorization, social representations and trajectory is revealed, which determines an interdisciplinary approach to countering the criminalization of the digital generation and studying it through "Legal Psychology", "Criminology" and "Age Psychology". The above statistics, as well as the data from the sociological survey, confirm the hypothesis about the influence of digital communities on the formation of digital deviations of minors and their further criminalization. &lt;strong&gt;Results.&lt;/strong&gt; The main results are to substantiate the idea that mental belonging is determined by the collective consciousness of the Internet community, where minors are exposed to new meanings, values and views; to analyze the stages of mental belonging, which involve a path from self-knowledge of minors to mental mimicry in this Internet community; to characterize individual forms of digital deviations of the modern generation of minors. &lt;strong&gt;Conclusions.&lt;/strong&gt; The mental identity of the digital generation also determines juvenile delinquency. Teenagers entering virtual reality leads to the formation of both new deviations and new types of crimes.&lt;/p&gt;</jats:p>