(TOarticle written and published 26 years ago. Still current).
In recent years we have become accustomed to reading increasingly alarming news about companies in the press violent youth groups. The Italian term ‘gang’ seems to no longer be sufficient to effectively convey the violence that these groups are capable of expressing and we resort, often inappropriately, to terms from our language borrowed from other contexts such as ‘branco’ or, above all, from English with a range of words ranging from gang to baby gang to hooligans and so on.
Social alarm and the language of violence
Although these are not entirely new facts, theintensifying social alarm over the increase in violence against young people and young people gathered in gangs, forces us to question the causes of the phenomenon, the particularities that make a group a violent gang, the difference in behavior between the isolated individual and that of gathered individuals in a group.
Who are the youth gangs today
First of all, speaking of youth gangs, it would be good to point out that we are not just talking about teenagers but about a wide age range that goes from pre-adolescence to the so-called young adults, between 20 and 30 years old.
Regarding the latter, Massimo Ammaniti recalled a few years ago that these are individuals who fall into that interminable period of stagnation which includes members of all social classes, young people who do not study, do not work, are not independent from their family, without realistic plans for the future.
This is not the place to analyze the causes of this situation, but the heavy responsibilities of adult society which limits itself to reacting to the failures of a youth without a future by attacking those young people are evident.
Adolescents and “prolonged adolescents”
The group of young adults, or rather of ‘prolonged adolescents’, has a particular characteristic that distinguishes it from the group of early adolescents.
The latter is necessary to psychologically detach oneself from the family while in the group of ‘prolonged adolescents’ one hides, one camouflages oneself, no one is individually responsible towards the outside of the group and everyone takes on a non-individual but group identity.
Strictly speaking they belong to the group and share its fate.
The need for identity and recognition
In this type of group we react aggressively to the unhappiness of the individual member who has accumulated frustrating experiences in the family, at school and at work.
Not recognized as an individual, the young person finds in the group that recognition and identity that he needs like air and for which he is willing to pay a very high price, such as that required to demonstrate loyalty towards a deviant group.
The myth of the “herd” and its risks
Let’s take the term ‘herd’ borrowed directly from zoology and applied to the violent group of human beings to imply the loss of humanity, the beastly, beastly ferocity.
I believe that the abuse of this term entails a consolatory hypothesis and some operational consequences: those of the ‘pack’ are not ours, they are not human beings but beasts and should be treated as such.
Too simple, ethologists, scholars of animal behavior, point out. Danilo Mainardi first of all highlights a point that packs of animals and packs of human beings have in common: ritualisation.
In predatory expeditions of social carnivores, such as wolves, we witness a multiplicity of rites tending to ensure solidarity, identity, compactness and coordination of the actions of the pack, recruitment rites, playful rites of greeting and friendship, rites of spontaneous submission to the pack leader.
Even in human groups we witness ritualizations of this type, tending more or less towards the same objectives. Especially in human ‘herds’ ritualization is accentuated, so much so that it can be stated that, whether good or bad, the group is such if it is strongly cohesive against external enemies and ritualized and it is precisely ritualization that makes success, the achievement of objectives more likely, whether they are socially acceptable or not.
Differences between animal and human herd
Is there therefore no difference between an animal herd and a human ‘herd’? Of course there is and this is what has prompted some of us to warn against the abuse of the term.
In the animal herd we are in the presence of instinctive behavior activated mostly under direct genetic control. In the human ‘herd’ perhaps there is no lack of genetic predisposition, especially in males, but the phenomenon is above all cultural.
As Mainardi states, “as regards the quality and modality of the rites and the purposes of the groups, man does not seem to possess well-defined genetic instructions. Thus it happens that our culture, divided into infinite variations and transmitted by many masters, good and bad, produces groups of all types, also good and bad. The so-called packs […] they are the most pathological representation of it, but that pathology does not reside in the biological foundations of our species, but rather in the growing chaos of cultural variants.”
The role of family and education
Regarding the predominantly male composition of violent groups, David T. Courtwright, professor of sociobiology at the University of North Florida, draws attention to the role of the family in controlling genetic violence in young males.
The systematic infringement of the law derives from poor self-control due to parental insufficiency in the first 6-8 years of life, absent fathers, distracted parents unable to recognize and repress their children’s deviant behaviour.
The family would have a decisive role in control of aggression, impulsiveness and the search for extreme sensations. The control of the male’s violent impulses and the maintenance of social order are a family task resulting from a very long period of selection.
Family support, information and training policies should be a fundamental part of violence prevention.
The wrong answers of adults
The adult response to the behavior of violent gangs should neither be of a justifiable, reparative type, based on a sense of guilt for real or presumed shortcomings of adults or of an unspecified ‘society’, nor of a merely repressive, punitive, marginalizing type, based on the mechanism of projection through which all our negative content is unloaded onto them.
Nor, above all, does it have to be indifference.
Each of these responses has the radical flaw of not recognizing the young person as an individual, as responsible for their own actions but also as a victim of a culture in which adults have their own, heavy responsibilities.
Prevention: a complex commitment
Those who want to prevent young people from committing crimes cannot get away with forgiveness or prison or indifference.
Prevention involves more challenging work: isolate the young person from the deviant group, take an interest in him as an individual, recognize him as such and not as a member of a gang, make the living environment less hostile with an adult example of care, commitment, moral cleanliness, imagination and openness towards the future.
It is also necessary make cities more livable, increase spaces of freedom, tolerance and solidarityreduce waste, promote greater social justice, provide study and work opportunities to young people.
It’s necessary coherence between what adults say and do, attribution of responsibility to the transgressor but also the possibility of recovery so that through the construction of one’s own personal identity one also recognizes oneself in a history of one’s own culture and comes to consider a collective good as one’s own good.
About the author
Fulvio Scaparropsychotherapist and writer, is the founder ofGeA Associationfor over 35 years committed to supporting couples in crisis through family mediation.
«In 1987, by founding the GeA Genitori Ancora Association, we began working on a project full of utopia: deal with conflicts, especially family conflicts, not only as destructive events but also as opportunities for growth and transformation of relationships. Help parents in separation to rediscover trust, hope, capacity for understanding and mutual recognition. Spread one culture of mediation from which highly useful results can derive not only for individuals but for the entire community in terms of pacification of social relations and trust in personal and community resources.
Over the years we have found many traveling companions endowed with courage, optimism, a profound awareness that, in schools as in the family, in companies as in institutions, there is an increasingly felt need for mediators who help the parties to negotiate, to look further ahead than a possible immediate victory, to seek alternative solutions to head-on collisions.
Above all, a long and fruitful journey of practice and reflection has been made not only on how, when, in which areas to mediate, but also and above all why it is worth mediating.”
The GeA Parents Association Ancóra ETS in 1989 it created the 1st Italian family mediation training school for public and private operators and in over 35 years of activity the association has trained hundreds of family mediators who have made specific expertise, listening and support available to parents to deal with the complexity of the situation in which they find themselves.
Read all Fulvio Scaparro’s articles on iO Donna here.
