Educare alla legalità per prevenire la devianza

Starting from youngsters’ statements of “little trust” in the main established institutions (including government, politics, police, healthcare, Church, education and family), the author delves into the motivations and effects of the widespread mistrust of the new generations towards the adult society. The reasons seem to include the ethical-moral disorientation and the value void characterizing youth nowadays. Young individuals need certainties, rules and limits allowing them to orientate and regulate themselves in an increasingly fast world, with frontiers that are no longer insuperable. The adults have abdicated from their educational responsibilities, in favor of an elusive friend figure (i.e., the parent-friend, the teacher-friend) that has nothing to do with the healthy and physiological asymmetry allowing the child/adolescent to differentiate him/herself from the adult in order to grow up. Deviance, therefore, defined as having a harmful, offensive and abusive conduct, and leading, in the worst case scenario, to delinquency, becomes an expression of discomfort that does not find alternatives for communication. Considered such an emergency, the author offers methodological recommendations and practical tools, such as orientation, counseling, writing cure, in order to promote prevention, favoring education paths to legality, to spread authentic values, sense of justice, responsibility towards others, desire to collaboration and sharing, aiming to a more human and democratic society.