At least in this case, there are no parents ready to attack teachers for a bad mark given to their child or, as the police often say, to defend them without any ifs or buts when they make a bigger mess and are taken to the barracks. The story that comes from Rivoli is opposite to this narrative. It is the story, reconstructed by the Turin edition of Corriere della Sera, of a mother who prefers to see her 14-year-old son in a juvenile prison rather than to beat, rob, terrorize, vandalize.
The boy began to get noticed between January and February when, together with other friends, he had seen fit to use fire extinguishers from an underground car park in Rivoli to smear the walls and damage the cars. Obviously the surveillance cameras had recorded everything and he and his accomplices had received a nice report.
Which, however, evidently, he must have taken as a medal for valor because from then on it was a crescendo: the 6 May, in the company of a peer, he robbed a slightly older boy, taking away his wallet and mobile phone and, faced with his resistance, he kicked and punched him
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He didn’t manage to get away with it this time either and the Court ordered him to stay at home, practically the equivalent of house arrest. But his parents couldn’t stop him: they saw him go out in the morning and return late in the evening. And then, in desperation, the poor mother was left with only one choice: to go to the police and report her son. And he did well, because the police thus ascertained that during his rounds he had met and threatened again the boy he had robbed and, with other friends, he had kicked and punched a newsagent guilty of having scolded them because they were riding along the corridors of a supermarket on their scooters.
At this point the judge had nothing left to do but transfer the 14 year old to the Ferrante Aporti juvenile prison in Turin. Let’s imagine the heartbreak of a mother when she sees her son’s bedroom empty, but her heart will perhaps be able to find some consolation in the idea that now she will no longer be able to do any more damage and perhaps, if he is followed as he will certainly happen, she will finally be able to embrace again not a criminal, but once again the son she has seen grow up. It will certainly take a long time, but as it is written in the Kairos community managed by the chaplain of the Beccaria prison in Milan Don Claudio Burgio, “There are no bad boys”.
