The most difficult thing is to try to decipher a violence that seems alien and totally senseless. The easiest thing is to fill the void with a reassuring explanation, which immediately silences our anxiety as adults or parents.
Killed with 25 stab wounds for 200 euros
Christopher Thomas Luciani, known to his friends as Crox, known to all as Thomas, was killed when he was 16 years old, with 25 stab wounds. For 200 euros, apparently. The two teenagers accused of the murder are also sixteen years old.
Thomas, a somewhat tangled life, grew up with his grandmother. The boys accused of the murder are the children of policemen and lawyers as well as other teenagers, among those present at the park in those dramatic moments. They and Thomas, students like many others.
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“Lack of emotional empathy”
We are dismayed by the “total absence of emotional empathy” of the boys involved in the murder, by that “chatting with macabre irony about the event that has just happened”. A like on Tiktok, however, cannot be enough to explain this void. We must make an effort to go further, to hope to find an answer to why Thomas was tortured and then abandoned in the weeds by his alleged murderers, why those same teenagers went to the seaside to swim after killing him. Like on any other day.
But thinking of our days as dripping with blood and death, even in spite of the numerical evidence, does not help understanding.
The smartphone filter
We all inhabit the world also thanks to smartphones, there is certainly the risk that many experience it only through that filter. This also applies to many adults.
Looking at young people only as people held hostage by smartphones and Tiktok, trap or influencers, perhaps makes adults feel absolved of their responsibilities but it does not help to understand everything that goes on in the heads of young people.
But if you want to understand, which is something different from justifying, you need humility and patience. Only in this way can you try to put the different pieces back together, like in a puzzle whose original design we do not know. And which includes first of all the social and family context, that is, the world of adults.
In search of meaning
Of course, social media affects our way of living and thinking, being together with others or deluding ourselves into doing so, opening ourselves up to the world or closing ourselves in a bubble, thinking of ourselves as an us and discovering ourselves alone. They can be fun but also toxic and are therefore also a mirror of what is outside and that we often do not see or pretend not to see. However, when in Novi Ligure the teenagers Erika and Omar planned and killed Erika’s mother and little brother with dozens of stab wounds, Facebook did not even exist. Not to mention the senseless cruelty of the Beasts of Satan. Boys responsible for torture, murder and induced suicide. They did not always have their smartphones in their hands and listened to metal music.
Difficult to understand and find an explanation, then as now. All that remains is to patiently try to put together one piece after another, in the hope of finding some answers and perhaps a meaning. If there is one.
