The story of the children from the Abruzzo woods, who a court had removed from the hut where they lived with their parents and placed in a family home, has provoked deep emotions in public opinion. An unconventional life choice, which the forest separates from the spoiled forest of rejected urban life, has something seductive. The judges’ intervention seems like an even cruel move. If a family wants to live like this, who can stop it? Who do the children belong to, the parents or the judges?
Children belong first and foremost to themselves. Of course, the family has by its nature a non-usurpable priority, and the Constitution says that it is up to parents to educate them, and that this is a right and duty. Indeed, it is a duty rather than a right, it is written like this. But then it means that children have expectations and needs and rights that require fulfillment, care and protection. And I listen to their inclinations and aspirations (so the code explains), for the harmonious development of the person. This is according to reason and nature and it would not even be necessary to recall the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires us to always decide in the best interests of minors.
We therefore become more thoughtful if the mushrooms in the forest bring the children to the emergency room and focus their attention on that primitive home, on their health, on the deserted school, on their isolation. When the report reaches the judges it is not a raid but a rescue operation: not an ideological prejudice towards those who choose alternative lifestyles, but the need to protect minors. As?
Juvenile court decisions are among the most sensitive in the entire justice system. Legal knowledge is not enough, psychosocial, educational and family skills are needed. For this reason, professional judges are joined with equal votes by lay judges, experts in those sciences.
We are walking on a narrow ridge, we must protect without destroying, intervene without replacing ourselves, decide without hurting unnecessarily. And whoever reads L’Aquila’s ordinance in full will find in it the stages of an initial intervention aimed at shedding light on habitability, health and education, without judging. Then, on the development of subsequent conduct, attention is focused on the risks of minors, not resolved but aggravated by instrumental media exposure.
The alarm is not only the home, health, school that can be legally supplied: for the court it is the deprivation of school sociality in the developmental age, the violation of the right to social life, which is not a pedagogical option, but a primary need of children.
So it is not for urban ideology against forest life, it is not for the punishment of eccentric and reluctant parents, but for the conscience of helping to heal those wounds. Without forfeiture of that power which by law is called parental “responsibility”: it is only suspended, not removed, in a provisional and reversible way.
We all hope that the family will be reunited once the problems have been resolved. But it is the Constitution that wants unfulfilled parental duties to be fulfilled, in any case, for the good of the children. Because the life of children belongs to their children.
