As coordinator of the youth and addictions area of the Casa del Giovane Community of Pavia, the psychologist Simone Feder he is often called upon, around Lombardy, to assist classes that have to process serious events, such as knife attacks in the school environment: «When it happens», he says, «everyone gets stuck, but first the perception of the danger of having a blade in your pocket, of hurting someone, is not felt. They are not trained to pick up alerts: before a stab that comes from a look out of place, there was a lack of respect, a disorderly life, which no friend noticed and tried to contain.”
We ask him about the recurring thought that having a knife in one’s pocket can be used to defend oneself from an attack, a sometimes naive imaginary that affects across the board, including high school students from disadvantaged backgrounds, as we too were able to observe during school meetings on the subject of legality: «They are afraid of gratuitous attacks, they think of carrying a knife, even though they are afraid of using it. Behind the hardships of Generation Z, in different social contexts, there is a lack of authoritative parental figures: like little plants that come up without the stake that keeps them upright, for too many kids the significant people of reference are only their peers. They grow up “exposed”: overloaded with stimuli and other people’s expectations, deprived of references, they continually try to be seen, not so much for a like, but to correspond to the label of man, of woman constructed by others, this also explains the knife in the boy’s pocket, the retouched photo of the girl on social media”.
«I have never carried knives, but I understand those who are afraid to go out in certain neighborhoods“, explains Alberto, 16 years oldresident in a provincial city north of Milan, in a community in Pavia, which shines a spotlight on music: «If there is also poetry in rap, certain trap lyrics vomit a violence that makes you shudder, some tell of a life that leaves a mark from which they then distance themselves, in others like Simba la Rue, Baby Gang there is exaltation. You should listen aware that it is not an instruction manual for life, but not everyone understands that. The music you listen to, the influence of those you hang out with, the lack of prospects if you start from difficult neighborhoods, of healthy meeting places are the things that lead kids down the wrong paths.”
Alberto perhaps doesn’t know that these were precisely the issues at the center of a parliamentary debate last October 15th, in London, where knives have long been a bigger emergency than here. The strategies that the Youth Endowment Fund (an independent charity that works in the United Kingdom to prevent violence among very young people) says are effective are the same as those indicated by Feder: «Involve in volunteering, sport, education, to lay the foundations that lead to “seeing” the other. You can’t see it if no one has taught you to see yourself, to verbalize your inner world: it ends up being unexpressed anger that prevails and determines impulsive actions, but anger is an emotion, it cannot become an identity.”
We wonder what impact drugs have: «Neuroscience tells us that cannabis, now almost generalized, acts on the prefrontal cortex: control, attention and thinking before acting are conditioned».
