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Emilia-Romagna �pilot project on street education�for youngsters�Addressing the issue of youth gangs through street �education

EU-BELONG Transnational Knowledge Sharing Event

19-21 March, Letterkenny (Ireland)

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Emilia-Romagna

Italy: about 58.997.201 inhabitants, 8,7% of whom (5.141.341) are migrants. Emilia-Romagna represent the 7,6% of the national population but hosts the 11.6% of the migrants regularly resident in the national territory

The Emilia-Romagna population (2023) counts 4.460.030 residents (F 51,2%), 568.804 of whom (F 52,55%) (413.511 TNC) are regularly resident migrants (12,75% of the pop.) and other 161.000 with a migratory background (new Italian citizenship reached in the past 10 years).

The incidence of the under 18 over the whole population is 15,1% while the minors incidence among the migrants rise to 20,3%

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You may know Emilia-Romagna because of its motors

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Or because of its art and leisure

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Or because of its food

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Bologna (390k unab.) is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna and the site of the older University of the world (1088 d.c.) and one of the larger of Europe (near 80k students) but, despite of our history and studies, we do not have idea of what “spaghetti bolognese” are.

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Shifting to our topic, in the last months on national and regional medias appared a lot of headlines about the so called “baby gangs” that cause a very high level of social alarm

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what are we talking about when we talk of “baby gangs”?

Far to be organized gangs as the ones of the movie, with this journalistic term are indicated a wide lengths of youth behaviors.

Most of these behaviours are just be gather together to “occupy” public spaces (shopping centers or squares), in a huge number of youths (hundreds, called at it by social media) mainly at the weekend or in occasion of some event such as trap concerts) and do nothing else.

Because of this simple but massive presence of a young people that speak loudly, use vulgar language, jump and sing (not only at meeting points, but even on trains or buses were they meet), that scares. And they make themselves perceived as threatening even if only in a very small minority of case, are physically violent and really dangerous (small thefts or small fights within peers or some act of “bravery” such as jumping on a police car) at must as answer to some “provocation” or to make a video to be post on the socials.

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According to a research of the University of Bologna commissioned by the Region on youth behaviour in urban areas (2023) these groups of youth are profiled as:

spontaneous, unstructured and a non-constant forms of aggregation. Meetings, beyond small groups of friends, are often occasional and limited in time.
With a strong participation of youth with migration background between 14-20 years old.
Strong in gathering individuals with a profile "typical of those who live in more marginal contexts" (e.g.: living in the same suburban neighbourhood), or who share the same situations of family, school, social and work hardship.
in need of using public spaces where to seek a space of visibility (mainly discos and shopping malls but also trains and squares).
good in exploiting the potential of social media to communicate and relate, but also to get out of marginality (spectacularization of the actions).

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Because the characteristics of the actors, the high level of social alarm, and the fact that this phenomenon are spread all over the region, with the EUBelong Project we start to work seriously on this matter: first discussing it in one of our LEARNING LAB and then, within our project stakeholder group, as the issue on which dedicate our pilot project through an integrated and intercultural approach and not only using a “low and order” approach.

This means dig deep in knowing why they act such kind of behaviours and if is possible, trying to change these attitudes, through a street educational approach, that embedded the social workers (as peers) in the group since when they begin to "constitute" the “wild-bunch”: on the train; on the bus; in the shopping center or in the square.

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We need to understand what underlies these behaviors and try to change them. At the same time, it is necessary to make the element of "numerosity" neutral by providing a realistic narrative of the phenomenon that does not end to frighten the public opinion (and in the case of shopping malls, customers and merchants)

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OUR PILOT

IMPLEMENTATION: the pilot action will be implemented by a social cooperative with experience in youth education

LEVEL OF INNOVATION

Public-Private Partnership: involvement of the private sector (a shopping center) as main actors. The shopping Center will guarantee the use of dedicated area/spaces in order to realise activities

REPLICABILITY possibility of modelling, disseminating and replicating the pilot action as good practice, both at local/national and European level. Multi-stakeholder group is identifying possible locations of replicability in Emilia-Romagna Region.

DURATION: March-October 2024