Respect is learned from an early age

For far too long attempts have been made to eradicate the endemic phenomenon of gender-based violence – of any kind – without in fact registering significant results. To a large extent the reason for this is due to not having gone to the roots of the problem. Where does the evil come from?

Are people born violent or do they become violent? Someone has already explored this, but her thought, empirically demonstrated and today supported by neuroscience, did not receive the attention it would have deserved. On the contrary, at the time, in Europe in the 1950s, it was dismissed and she was expelled from the Order for having dared to question the foundations of the Freudian school.

I am talking about Alice Miller, a psychotherapist of Jewish origin, born in 1923 in Lviv, who after escaping the Nazi camps obtained in Switzerland a degree and a doctorate in philosophy, psychology and sociology. She practiced the profession for twenty years, then the urgency to find answers to her personal story and to those of her patients led her to a surprising turning point. Starting from the study of thousands of cases in her activity as a psychoanalyst and from the biography of twentieth-century dictators, but also of artists and intellectuals, she came to develop a disruptive theory – and therapy.

At the center of her work is the incrimination of education in general – both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian – behind which the exercise of power by adults is often concealed and not the response to the real needs of children. The point is that those who have not received in the first days, months, years of life the necessary love, respect and listening will not be able to develop that self-knowledge and that trust in their own feelings necessary to grow in freedom, think with their own mind, love and feel empathy and compassion for others.

Those who, moreover, have suffered mistreatment and sexual abuse will then be even more inclined to compulsion, that is, to the repetition of what they have suffered, through destructive behaviors towards themselves or others, starting with those over whom they have absolute power: their sons and daughters.

Unfortunately, there are far more cases of this kind than one might imagine, even today, in the 21st century and in our Italy. The 14th edition of the dossier Indifesa – La condizione delle bambine e delle ragazze nel mondo 2025, published in October 2025 by Fondazione Terre des Hommes, gives us an alarming picture.

According to data collected by the Criminal Analysis Service of the Central Directorate of Criminal Police, for the first time crimes committed against minors have exceeded the threshold of 7,000 cases (7,204), with an increase of 4% compared to the previous year and 35% compared to ten years ago. 63% of the total number of victims (an increase compared to 61% in 2023) are girls, but they reach 88% in crimes of sexual violence, 86% in those of aggravated sexual violence, 85% in cases of sexual acts with minors. Things do not change in digital crimes, where female victims are 86% in cases of possession of child pornography material and 74% in those of child pornography.

The shocking figure is that mistreatment within the family remains the most frequent type of crime. In 2024, 2,975 cases were recorded, with an increase of 5% compared to the previous year and 101% compared to ten years ago. And, ça va sans dire, in 53% of cases the victims are female. Meanwhile, in crimes of violation of family assistance obligations (479 cases, -9%), abuse of correction and discipline (345 cases, -1%) and child abandonment (577 cases, +2%), they are more often male. Finally, the voluntary homicides of minors in 2024 are rising again after years of decline: 21 episodes (+75%), in which in 76% of cases the victims are boys.

And yet, the solution does not lie in punishment. Or rather, not only in punishment, because reality shows that using violence to repress violence is a certain failure. Miller’s investigation into the wounds of the soul, often inflicted – for their own good – on defenseless children by loved ones or reference figures, such as parents or teachers, is illuminating.

Neuroscience today tells us that a single encouragement is more effective than 89 scoldings, yet the educational system – as well as the penal or prison system – is still tied to the culture of punishment as a tool to repress inappropriate behavior, in the belief that only in this way can a person improve, without investigating the deep reasons. It is a mode useful for maintaining control, masked by good intentions, which does not bring out the best in the human being, rather it feeds their most limbic, primitive part. From here we should have the courage to start again in order to build a society based on respect.