Caivano Green Park: how do you change a difficult reality?

This article on the Caivano Green Park is published in issue 38 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 19 September 2023

CHow do you change an area that has come under the control of crime? How does the State make its presence felt, rebuild trust in people? After the case of repeated violence against two thirteen-year-old girls, in recent weeks the spotlight has been on the Caivano Green Park and many Italians have discovered the existence of a ghetto that had been ignored for decades.
There are many other places like the Green Park in Italy, which are rarely mentioned in the newspapers but which are time bombs ready to explode, where people suffer pressure and violence that is not talked about, where youth crime and school dropouts are very high and it is very difficult both to stay and to leave.
How do you change a difficult territory? At the moment, the line that seems to prevail is the repressive one: maxi blitz, toughening of penalties for teenagers who commit crimes, prison for parents who do not send their children to school.

Yet it is not with the fear of prison for parents that school dropout is combated, but with social workers who understand the reasons why it happens and who have the resources to resolve difficult situations. And it is not only with the fear of punishment that the delinquency of very young people is combated. Anyone who has set foot in a juvenile prison, and has spoken to the educational figures who look after the inmates, knows that after serving their sentence nothing improves in their lives. They return to freedom but they have no training, they have no job, they don’t know where to go and who to turn to, and they almost always end up returning to the same places to commit other crimes, even more full of frustration, violence and disillusionment.

The safety and protection of people must be guaranteed, but above all resources must be used to provide other possibilities: so that we can live with dignity with legal jobs, so that we can be independent, have services and a peaceful life. We need to offer support to teachers, who when they work in certain areas are alone, vulnerable, and feel the weight of a number of problems to which they cannot respond.
According to Roberto Saviano, certain blatant repressive actions «are nothing more than a useless propaganda stunt. Maxi raids, as happened in Caivano, do not change the destiny of a territory, they do not offer redemption, they are operations carried out for pure political propaganda.”

Alternatives must be offered, because in difficult territories there are always people who ask for other possibilities, and many others who can change if they are listened to and given attention. The repression serves to give the idea to those outside those territories that something concrete is being done, but it does not really change the internal conditions.
The first objective of the institutions, on the contrary, should be to rebuild the trust of those who live in those places and would like to have a happy life without any relationship with crime. And you rebuild that trust if you offer redemption through actions that certainly make less noise, but which are driven by the profound idea that places can truly flourish again.

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