Teenagers’ ‘unease’ also stems from mum and dad

The eleven-year-old boy who was stealing belts has blue eyes, looks more Italian or Slavic than North African, and cannot be held criminally responsible. Not even retrospectively. But what about his parents? Or at the very least: will they really be capable of exercising parental responsibility, they and the other hundreds of mums and dads from the ‘Children’s Crusade’ – those waiting outside the police station, calling their own children ‘idiots’ for whom they have failed to care? And will the juvenile magistrates at the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office even address this issue? We have witnessed months of applause for the magistrates who split up the family in the woods: ‘Well done, they don’t know how to bring up their children!’ But no one talks about how these young rioters were brought up. The ‘street mentor’ Marco Rossi-Doria said: ‘We need a certain degree of discretion when approaching these families.’ Quite right. And then there’s the rest of it.

Marco Rossi-Doria currently heads the social enterprise Con i Bambini and has a wealth of experience; interviewed by Vita.it, he says: “You have to try to imagine what it means to work over 40 hours a week, remain below the poverty line and still try to secure a future for your children”. It is right not to be pedantic: the figures on economic poverty (let’s focus on the Milanese hinterland) are well known, whilst those on social deprivation and educational poverty are monitored by several organisations and receive constant attention. Two years ago, the Cariplo Foundation – at the forefront in terms of ideas and resources in this field – presented a forward-looking report to the Senate: one that was probably heard by a commission of the deaf. Yet a step back—or to the side—is necessary. The Milan hinterland—the area from which, via comfortable if slow trains and fine underground services, teenagers and pre-teens (as they say in the youth clubs) travel to Milan for looting, but also for gang fights every Saturday afternoon—is a mixed area. There are affluent provinces and poor suburbs, and even the ‘existential’ suburbs, as a Pope once put it. But they are not like the banlieues of France. Even in the poor and ‘existential’ suburbs, there are schools; for better or worse, there are services, discount stores and shopping centres. There are jobs too, with the lowest unemployment rate in Italy. Admittedly, they are low-paid jobs: and that is Italy’s primary problem. This situation does not, in itself – and with the sociological-ideological automatism of certain indulgences halfway between Ilaria Cucchi and Marracash – justify the ransacking of shop windows (not bakeries). There is more to it, at least in two respects. As Rossi-Doria summarises once again, there is “the gap between the wealth of the ‘protected centres’ and the poverty of the suburbs”, which is more visible in the north than it is in the south. And as some of the young people involved last Saturday themselves explained, the attraction to those ‘protected centres’ – to what they represent, both in practical and symbolic terms – is the trigger that sets the rest in motion. Even magistrates speak of “a tendency to break the rules, to flout the law” without any awareness of or fear of the consequences. As with the knives at school, no sense of reality has been instilled in them. There is also the responsibility their parents bear, but which no one dares to pin on them: it’s not as if they’re a couple of shabby, half-baked hippies who want to live in isolation in the countryside – that, now, is the sort of anti-social behaviour that deserves punishment. But is it justifiable not to know where a 13-year-old child is at two in the morning? It’s always easier to blame society, or the school system that isn’t working.

According to recent data, the NEET rate (young people not in education, employment or training) in Milan stands at 20 per cent, although this also affects other age groups. And the school drop-out rate is over 12 per cent, although it is not as prevalent among pupils of compulsory school age as it is in the South. According to Il Sole 24 Ore, economic inequality (Gini coefficient) stands at 0.54, among the highest in Italy (in the northern regions, those who are well-off are very well-off). The resulting analysis is that the overall wealth of the metropolitan area is not redistributed fairly. Rather than excusing parents who do not look after their children or are unable to do so, rather than blaming ‘social deprivation’ – the new spectre haunting Europe, yet without even a Marxist perspective – these are the issues on which to base a serious strategy to tackle educational poverty. Including that of the parents themselves. Which is the primary cause of what has happened and what will happen.