The near-tragedy at the “Giovanni Verga” Comprehensive Institute, where a 13-year-old student stabbed the teacher while filming the scene live, cannot be classified as a simple fact of violence or crime news.
Even more so because on Wednesday, in Lamezia Terme, an almost identical episode, starring a 14-year-old, was foiled shortly before it could be carried out.
It therefore seems clear that we are faced with a serious phenomenon, which to be effectively combated must first be investigated and understood. Precisely with this in mind, Panorama interviewed the Doctor Luca Dinatale, developmental psychotherapist as well as criminologist and Honorary Judge at the Juvenile Court of Milan.
Doctor, the central role played by technology in these cases of crime news is now clear. What effects is its spasmodic use having on children of developing age?
Technology does not in itself create violence, but it has certainly changed the context in which an adolescent builds his own identity.
The gaze of others is fundamental, in this historical phase that gaze is also facilitated by technology and potentially continuous and boundless. The risk is also that discomfort, the need for revenge or anger find online not only a space in which to be expressed, but an audience, an audience, together with models to draw inspiration from.
I wouldn’t talk about a causal relationship between technology, social media and violence; however, technology can become a powerful amplifier of present fragilities.
When a violent act is carried out to be seen, how much does the presence (real or just imagined) of an audience matter? What function does the group have, including the online one?
The presence of an audience matters a lot, adolescence is a period in which you try to answer questions regarding how others see you, who you are for others. Anonymity is certainly experienced as a profoundly mortifying experience for the adolescent
In some vulnerable young people, the extreme violent act can take on an identity and performance function. ‘Through this gesture I finally become someone’, ‘I am seen, I produce and leave a trace’.
The online group functions as a permanent audience, as a place in which fantasies that individually could have remained an idea are then recognized, shared and even radicalized.
How important are the ’emulation’ and ‘copycat’ mechanisms? To what extent can the spectacularization of these cases become a model for other fragile adolescents?
These are very important concepts, it is a very well known phenomenon, particularly in the literature relating to school massacres. There are many cases, such as that of Columbine (tragic massacre which took place in the school of the same name on 20 April 1999 in the United States, ed.) or that committed by Anders Breivik in Norway.
These are cases that showed a very “performative” dimension, in the sense of “exhibition”, the authors had constructed images, recordings, destined to survive the act, and so it was.
This is very important, because many teenagers do not imitate the single gesture, but it is as if they appropriate the script: the way of dressing, the words, the preparation, the search for fame.
Spectacularizing an act of violence can give a shape and a narrative to a discomfort that had not existed there until that moment.
Does the problem of Technology lie in its “neutrality”? Is the basic assumption: “if you can do it, do it”, regardless of the consequences?
I don’t think technology makes the emotional experience of watching what you watch completely neutral. Certainly, however, there is a growing distance between the possibilities offered by technology and the ability to mentalize its consequences. Also, to a certain extent, due to the nature of the medium itself.
This must then be intertwined with the developmental phase in which an adolescent finds himself, who is involved in building the capacity for self-regulation, in assuming responsibility, in predicting the consequences of his own behavior.
Technology makes experiences very accessible, muffled, in some ways, from an emotional point of view. It makes many actions replicable and visible to many.
In this sense, the educational task must also be to introduce a space between possibilities and actions: I can do a certain action, but what consequences can it produce on me and on others?
This is fundamental work for any teenager, especially for a teenager who is growing up in this historical phase in which technology speaks of models of achievement that remind you of the idea that “if you want, you can”.
Returning to recent news, how do you distinguish an impulsive aggression from a premeditated and performative action? What signs should have been alarming?
In retrospect it is always easier to construct a sequence that seems inevitable. The individual signals are often non-specific, they are not so precise as to allow us to imagine a causal link as clear and clean as the acts in Rome.
An impulsive act of violence arises in the immediate aftermath of an emotional escalation. In a premeditated gesture there is preparation, there are mental anticipations, the tools are chosen…
Here there is also the aspect of the performance to take into consideration, a representation of the audience to whom the gesture must reach. There could have been some signals, it seems to me that communications had been given, being able to then associate them with the gesture that was performed seems rather complicated to me.
It should be underlined, however, that these kids usually experience difficulties: it is therefore a question of grasping these difficulties before a radical and destructive project takes shape in their mind.
For example?
Usually there is a convergence of signals, there is isolation, a break with the educational environment, persecutory, paranoid perceptions or a sense of humiliation, there is often a fascination with previous perpetrators of massacres.
All this can be accompanied by emotional changes that can be grasped and a virtual life that becomes the permanent place in which a boy builds his identity and, as in the case of Rome, the sense of belonging to radicalized communities.
