“What was he doing with the knife at school? Where did he get it? Was this the first time you took him to school? With what intentions? These are questions that the investigating judiciary will have to clarify, but which must necessarily question the collective conscience of adults”: this is what the sociologist declares Antonio MarzialeGuarantor for Childhood and Adolescence of the Calabria Region, regarding the events at the “Da Vinci” high school in Reggio Calabria, where a fifteen-year-old stabbed a peer.
“Why are these kids getting out of hand? This is the question that should worry us until we have given answers to a spread of juvenile violence, whose roots – in the opinion of the Guarantor – also lie in the perpetuation of violence as a method of resolving even insignificant disputes, to the point of rewarding the winners of video games”.
“It’s the fault of our abdication – Marziale insists – and of that belief that today’s minors are “bigger” than we were at their age, which pervades parents as much as legislators, who go so far as to ask for the lowering of age threshold for every aspect: from car license to rifle permit, not to mention that we are the nation with, shamefully, the lowest age of sexual consent in Europe”.
“Considering them as more mature than their biological age – highlights the sociologist – is only useful to put their conscience relatively at ease, but does not correspond to reality. In the approximately 300 thousand years that we have existed anatomically as human beings, we have not really been able to find any significant psychobiological differences, therefore, enough with this justification of the sole desire to free ourselves from responsibility as soon as possible”.
Finally, for the Guarantor: “It is the lack of control that generates deviance and juvenile crime, it is the abdication of the correct exercise of parental responsibility, it is making friends rather than parents or educators, it is the inability to dictate the rules even at the cost of making mistakes, it is the excessive permissiveness granted over time. It is all these things put together that give us the answer and the solution is more than obvious, at least to drain the statistics: get back to being parents seriously and even if some teachers began to exercise the authority of the role again, perhaps the school would have fewer wounds from heal.”
Continue reading on StrettoWeb
