«Excuse me, do you have a cigarette?», this is often how the gratuitous violence of young people on the street begins, with no difference between a yes and a no.
Seen from this tidy desk, in the Investigating Judge’s office of the Juvenile Court of Milan, through which indictments, warrant interrogations and preliminary hearings of minors accused of crime in the western Lombardy district pass, the stabbing of the Bocconi boy is the tip of an iceberg. Under the surface of the water, avalanches of files of episodes, «definitely more frequent in Milan but which also happen in other cities», individually perhaps less serious in the outcomes, which however have at the center a boy, sometimes a girl, with a blade in his pocket.
“To justify himself to us,” he says Nicoletta Cremonaan expert magistrate, who has been in this office for five years, after years in adult criminal law, «almost everyone says that they carried a knife, most of the time taken trivially in the kitchen, sometimes a Swiss army knife, in some cases a butterfly knife, to “defend themselves”, for fear of being attacked in the street. But my impression is that they say it under the illusion of alleviating responsibility.”
The investigating judge’s office is already a filter, the cases arrive there “selected”, so to speak, based on a certain severitythose arrested, those already in contact with the services, those with a preliminary hearing in progress which perhaps results in an indictment order: «I couldn’t say if they already knew beforehand that it is a crime to have a knife in your pocket, because when they get here someone has already informed them and they know it. The impression is that “defending oneself” is an excuse and that in reality there is more a search for a pretext to explode an experience of anger, an “evil inside”. The futility of situations makes him think. Generally a robbery for loot of very little value: headphones, a few euros, which it is not clear whether they are an opportunity or a pretext to attack.”
And maybe then, since it’s in our pocket, we even miss the stab wound: «Some make the news, due to their severity or because they make an impression due to the type of wound, but thea blade used or carried around and the use of substances (almost all hashish, but even heavier things, especially psychotropic drugs like Rivotril) they are a constant among minors who end up in the criminal circuit».
The problem is that when there is a knife in your pocket, sooner or later it comes out and sometimes it ends badly, even very badly. The data from last February’s report on voluntary homicides in Italy by the criminal police say so, the tip of the tip of the iceberg: they have not increased absolutely, always less than 350 per year in Italy, but in 2023 and in 2024 the figure for those caused by a degenerated dispute rose to 45% and 49% respectively. While among the weapons, in the graphs on one side the band indicating the blades lengthens, on the other the segment indicating the young people as perpetrators thickens, with victims of the same age.
Very small numbers overall, fortunately, the extreme tip of the tip of the iceberg, but an indicator of a propensity, which can be perceived even in the absence of extreme outcomes: «This is indicated by the increasingly numerous files that we open for children between 12 and 14 years oldto close them again because they are below the attributable age and because they are not too serious in themselves, while when they are serious even under 14 years of age safety measures are possible”.
We ask her who these kids with the box cutter in their pockets are: «They have in common a low socio-cultural background, running away from school, many cases of unaccompanied minors who have not been able to be kept in reception contexts, who perhaps live on the streets, easy prey for criminal networks who provide them with some change and drugs; but also many cases of second generation Italians who live in family contexts of very good parents, who do everything they can to work and give references to their children, children who then, however, go out, join up with other peers and then we find them with the knife. A little more rarely they come from better-connected communities, but there the robbery is more often done without a knife. The further down we go into the educational context, the more there is school dropout, the more they move around free day and night, the more we find drugs and knives. Almost always, among the kids who commit this type of crime, there is a group dynamic.”
In the Corso Como case, the violence of the words after that of the facts made the news: «The thing that continues to strike me, in children compared to adults, is the gratuitousness of violence, the lack of empathy, I’ve never seen a guy truly desperate for what he had done. When I ask them: “But what if instead of the one you hurt there had been your mother, your father, your brother?”. They seem to perceive only themselves, at most they grasp the pain caused to their parents, often, except in cases of maximum degradation, respectable people who work all day. What we don’t see is the ability to identify with the pain inflicted on others, on the victims.”
Sometimes fear also suggests to them the temptation to arm themselves in the illusion of defending themselves: «We should go to schools to explain that carrying a knife is a crime and that often having it means putting yourself at even greater risk.”
