Sweet Dear Mum

(Rebellious Angels Ninth Part)

Recently news has reported various cases of children who killed their parents. Besides the usual indignant and horrified reactions, the perpetrators of the crimes have found consent and admiration among their peers.

Two students, in different institutes, replied to a questionaire entitled “I’d like…” and distrbuted in nursery, primary and secondary schools in the province of Modena “I’d like to kill my father and my mother”.

Since some years ago various episodes would happen from time to time causing a temporary interest as a news story and not as “a social phenomenon”.

Besides parricide is a very ancient phenomenon and in the past it had caused fears very different from the ones of the present time.

In ancient Rome such was the terror of fathers to be killed by their children that to punish parricide a special penalty “the torture of the sack ( poena cullei )” was thought. The perpetrator of the crime was shut up inside a leather or cloth sack, covered with pitch, together with a dog, a cock, a monkey and a viper.

Then the sack was put on a black cart, towed by black oxen and carried to the banks of the Tiber to be thrown into the river.

Anyhow some justification for parricide children might be found: in the Roman law nobody was a subject of law since father was still living. Children couldn’t have a property of their own, everything depended on their father’s generosity; father could give them an amount of money, but at the same time to revoke it. Obviously some children would only wait for father’s death ” you are already an obstacle to your son – Juvenal reminds a father – and you are really waiting too much to satisfy his wishes; your obstinate old age torments him.

Neither the penalty of the sack was enough to stop the phenomenon of parricide and so in 55 B.C. a law provided to punish as parricide also those who had only bought some poison in order to kill their father, even without doing so and it was even decided that the penalty was to be extended also to those who had lent the necessary money. Neither this was enough because , according to Tacitus aand Suetonius, emperor Claudius was compelled to apply the penalty of the sack so often that this torture became more frequent than crucifixion.

Isolated episodes of parricide, like Doretta Graneris’s case, who on 13^th November 1975 in the province of Vercelli, together with her fiancè, killed her father, mother, brother and two grandparents, caused, nowadays, just a temporary sensation.

and it is only in the last seven years the phenomenon has got peculiar features:

The killing of a parent doesn’t concern only father any longer, oftener and oftener mother with a clear prevalence for the latter in the last episodes.

• The number of parricides and matricides is increased in the last six, seven years of 100% as to the average of the last 20 years
• The killing of mother or father finds such a consent among young people as to drive to emulation giving the phenomenon an epidemic character.

This transformation of parricide-matricide from an occasional episode into a social phenomenon at epidemic character starts with the story of Pietro Maso who, together with some friends, beat to death his father and mother to take possession of their patrimony[1] and have a good time.

This was followed by a series of episodes till the case of Erika who, together with Omar her fiancé, stabbed to death her mother Giusy Cassini and Gianluca her brother.

Since the beginning Erika’s case shows all the features to attract media’s attention and keep it for long time:

• An abnormal crime;
• The typology of a perfect sacrifical victim of Giusy her mother, a deeply catholic and irreproachable mother and Gianluca her brother whose last composition, full of love, is just dedicated to Erika, her sister;
• The absence of a paternal figure;
• Erika and Omar’s attempt to remove suspicions from themselves by accusing some improbable Albanian kidnappers;
• The mutual accusations of Erika and Omar themselves once discovered.

Erika’s story has been found, for long time, on the first pages of the press starting up the usual comments and explanations that may be found in analogous episodes.

Psychiatrists and other professionals try to explain the fact that a sixteen-year-old girl, together with her seventeen-year-old fiancé, can give 50 stabs to her mother and 52 to her brother with a knife the blade of which is 18 centimetres long: this is what they deduced( I leave the reader any comment!):

• Lack of fulfilment in the family cage (Aldo Carotenuto, a psychiatrist);
• No reception of the evident signs of discomfort from her parents (Maria Teresa Crotti, a childhood and adolescence psychotherapist);
• Personality disorder characterized by narcissism (Luigi Cancrini, a psychiatrist)
• We can’t listen to them(Paolo Crepet)[2];
• In that family there must have been a strong discomfort (Paolo Crepet);
• Erika didn’t kill a person but an idea (Paolo Crepet);
• We are on the way of the murderous ogre[3] (Maria Rita Parsi, a psychotherapist);
• Demoniacal possession (father Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist);
• Satanism (Viator, a monthly magazine of Christian inspiration [4]);
• “If we want to find something linking the most recent crimes of underage people, we can find it in families who love their children so much but are unable to be authoritative and normative” (Livia Locci,Public Prosecutor).

[1] At present we have no more news about Pietro Maso’s legal position, but when the facts happened press had revealed that since he was, together with his sister, the only heir of his killed parents’ patrimony, no matter how the sentence should be, he would have been able anyhow to take possession of this inheritance.

[2] Maybe Erika should really have been listened to when in her diary she says“They are only interested in him:how good Gianluca is at school, how handsome Gianluca is”.

[3] An alleorical interpretation

[4] The fact that when Erika was thirteen she would speak about tortured animals and draw bleeding daggers and forks, might more simply confirm the propensity of the girl to aggressiveness.

Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci

To be continued in:

10) Parricide (Sweet Dear Mum – Rebellious Angels Tenth Part)

See also:

1) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels First Part)

2) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Second Part)

3) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Third Part)

4) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Fourth Part)

5) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness ( Rebellious Angels Fifth Part)

6) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Angels Sixth Part)

7) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels   Seventh Part)

8) Intraspecific Human Aggressiveness (Rebellious Angels Eighth Part)