By Allegra Maria Ferlazzo Flores
According to Save the Children, nine years ago, 700 million minors lived in an Italian municipality which had been dissolved for infiltration by the mafia between 1994 and 2014. This shocking piece of data leads us to consider just how broad and multifaceted the impact of mafia organisations is upon the lives of children, whether they are already the offspring of a family involved in organised crime or are introduced to the phenomenon later in their life. Whatever the case may be, children are well and truly forgotten mafia victims, as the impact of criminal activity on them is often covert and of the psychological type. Such insidious effects cannot fail to call for renewed means of action, especially through education, in order to teach this most vulnerable section of the population never to lend its tacit or explicit consent to such a destructive phenomenon.
Perhaps the most striking example of the deleterious influence of mafia organisations on the lives of children and teenagers is the case of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the son of Santino Di Matteo, a former member of Cosa Nostra turned justice collaborator. In order to pressure the former into withholding information from the judicial authorities, Cosa Nostra clans kidnapped the twelve-year old child and help him prisoner for 779 days in an insalubrious little cell in the Sicilian countryside. The mafia turned little Giuseppe Di Matteo’s short life into a tragedy. After more than two years of keeping him thus imprisoned, his jailers strangled him, and then melted his body into acid, forever destroying the remains of their victim. This crime had rather broader implications that the personal and familial side of it. It showed that innocent children could be used as mere dehumanised pawns in mafia’s deadly chess game, completely disregarding their right to life and to innocence and considering them as nothing more than tools of pressure of a clan towards a rival one.
Aside from such blatant crimes of the mafia against children, the effects of organised crime upon them are also largely subtle and not evident. Living in a territory controlled by organised crime has repercussions on the local economic system, through the establishment of mechanisms based on extortions, corruption and concussion, for example through the pizzo, that is to say, a sort of “tax” payed to the mafia. Therefore, participation in mafia organisation comes to be seen as the only viable source of revenue, fabricating itself to be an attractive alternative for young people residing in territories often plagued by difficulties linked to poverty and unemployment. It is indeed true that some children and teenagers are directly issued from mafia families, but even among those who are not, there can be a development of a sort of tacit allegiance to a mafia clan. In certain cases, such an involvement is far-reaching: between January 1st, 2010, and March 31st, 2011, 12 minors were denounced for participation in a mafia organisation. Thus, children and young people prove to be a demographic category highly preyed upon by the mafia, who supports itself on the lack of economic and professional opportunities in the territories in which it implants itself.
While contemplating such issues, one cannot help but wonder, what is to be done? Is there any safeguard possible, any viable form of protecting children and teenagers from snake-like insinuation of mafia organisations into their daily life, into their mindsets and into the way they perceive the world? Experiences of education to legality are central to instilling into young people’s minds a strong refusal of the gangrene of organised crime. Indeed, societal opposition to the mafia can only stem from deeply rooted values cultivated into a culture of legality. It is therefore not to wonder that several of the main actors of social antimafia are individuals or associations involved in the education of children and teenagers. One might perhaps mention Fr. Pino Puglisi, a high school teacher in the Brancaccio neighbourhood of Palermo, murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1993 for his social work among young children and teenagers, which focused on helping them absorb values of legality. This was precisely the reason for his murder. Indeed, mafia clans of Palermo considered that his social engagement in education had diverted young teenagers from getting involved in organized crime.
Children, teenagers, and young adults are, yes, easy and vulnerable victims of mafia organizations. But it is also through them that organized crime can be defeated. It therefore ought to be the role of educational institutions to implement initiatives in order to enshrine into the new generations a culture of legality and of social antimafia, for indeed, following the words of magistrate and Cosa Nostra victim Paolo Borsellino .
“If youth refuses its consent, even the omnipotent and mysterious mafia will vanish like a nightmare.”
Bibliography
Corazza, L. “Antimafia nella Didattica Scolastica. Prodotti Multimediali per la Formazione di Studenti e Insegnanti” in Studium Educationis. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia Editore, 10/2013.
Corazza, L. and Zanchettin, A. “Educazione alla legalità, alla responsabilità sociale e all’inclusione. Una ricerca sui temi dell’antimafia sociale.” in Journal of Theories and Research in Education. 01/12/2016.
Palazzolo, S. “La cella, il letto e la botola, l’inferno del piccolo Giuseppe di Matteo” in La Repubblica. 10/01/2021.
Save The Children. I minori e le mafie in Italia. 19/03/2014.
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