Filicide, the word is missing
The poverty of our heart is more painful than that of our wallet and sometimes results in tragedy, when it degenerates into psychic pathology, into alteration of the mind. In this case, it is the children who pay the price first and foremost. Battista Falconi's italics
What is striking, in the news and comments on the tragic death of the little girl whose mother let her fly with her from the sixth floor of a building in Ravenna, is the lack of a word: filicide. The woman was saved, the little girl died and they heard her begging: "No, mother!". It is difficult to imagine a more heartbreaking scene. To tell the truth, the peripherality of the news in the schedules of news programs and newspapers is also striking, indicating an insufficient sensitivity towards a problem which instead has extremely worrying dimensions, and the consequent lack of connections with the many previous cases. The failure to use the lemma depends precisely on the poor historicization.
The distraction, obviously, stands out even more because we find ourselves living in the era of feminicide. We emerge from 2023 in which this term entered the common lexicon and was celebrated as word of the year by linguists and dictionaries. In particular after the case of Giulia Cecchettin, its repeated use has produced greater awareness of violence against women, which has also translated into a significant increase in reported cases and preventive and repressive interventions of the phenomenon (this is attested by the data recent ones from the Anti-Crime Department). We can only be satisfied with it, without hiding the risks of ideologization of this sensitivity and of a diagnostic excess that could lead to targeting some presumed culprit, damaging the fundamentals of our law (cases of false or highly exaggerated complaints are starting to emerge) .
The sacrosanct indignation for feminicides, however, is incomplete precisely because it is not inserted into a broader dynamic in which family violence should be contextualized and framed. We know that crimes against women are committed for the vast majority by husbands, boyfriends, partners or ex-boyfriends, therefore in the context of emotional relationships, the one in which they occur, to a lesser extent but which should not make us underestimate the drama, also crimes against children. It even took time for due attention to be paid to the problem of children and minors who become orphans following a femicide. Too often, then, the little ones are the direct victims of adult violence, whether father or mother, male or female.
This domestic violence is not a recent phenomenon and may have a thousand causes which could be discussed at length, including the structural identity crisis of the family, its now evident fragility, the insufficiency of the basic social nucleus to contain instincts , aspirations, dissatisfaction, frustrations, individual suffering, perhaps in a somewhat compulsive way as happened in the past. We say this without regret or nostalgia, as a simple observation.
A few days ago, one of the editorialists who writes best in national newspapers, sometimes using this rhetorical skill for a display of somewhat corny and biased do-goodism, appropriately highlighted the painful case of the elderly widow without children who was plagiarized by her carer, who moved and somehow imprisoned in her mother's house in Romania (for eight years!) while she enjoyed the poor lady's house and money. An episode which probably, thanks to the abolition of the crime of plagiarism, occurs more frequently than it appears and which confirms, if any were needed, how the loneliness and invincible unhappiness that derives from the lack of affection – or rather, from failure to perceive affection through concrete signs of solidarity and closeness – is one of the worst evils of our society and our time. As with previous ones and future ones, of course.
The American Constitution, as is known, includes the right to the pursuit of happiness in their Charter of Independence, the topic is much debated and an Eastern country has replaced the Gross Domestic Product with Gross Happiness, inserting some intangible values into the calculation. It is a path that is hypothesized to be followed even in advanced Western societies where we try to measure everything with numerical, financial, economic and monetary data. The poverty of our heart is more painful than that of our wallet and salary (with which it can naturally converge) and sometimes results in tragedy, when it degenerates into psychic pathology, into alteration of the mind. In this case, it is the children who pay the price first and foremost.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/figlicidio-manca-la-parola/ on Tue, 09 Jan 2024 07:48:31 +0000.