Scafati, 13-year-old beaten because he is homosexual, Arcigay: 'Educate about differences'

“The list of boys and girls who end up in the sights of bullies and gangs all over the country, becoming targets of violence and marginalization, is now updated with alarming frequency”. This is what Gabriele Piazzoni, national secretary of Arcigay, declared, referring to “another terrible homotransphobic attack”, which took place in Scafati, in the Salerno area, against a thirteen-year-old, beaten because he was gay by a group of boys who attended his school. Before that, “we read with horror – adds Piazzoni – of the suicide of a seventeen-year-old in Turin, exasperated by the bullying”. “We repeat it on every occasion: the only antidote to this drift is education about differences – underlines Piazzoni -. However, behind the pain and indignation that all politicians express in commenting on these facts, there is a piece of that same politics, transversal to parties and sides, that methodically hinders the projects that many associations like ours carry forward in schools, claiming the right of families to remove their children from these educational paths. In this way, homotransphobia, sexism, machismo, racism are transmitted from parent to child, as an inexorable fact, indeed even legitimate because it is familiar and traditional. We can only be ashamed of this politics, which offers shelter to the violent”. “The Arcigay Salerno Territorial Committee – adds the local president Francesco Napoli – expresses the closeness of the entire community to the young thirteen-year-old attacked in Scafati. The Arcigay Committee confirms its availability to the family for free legal support and confirms its intention to constitute itself as a civil party in a possible trial. Minorities are increasingly the target of aggression and discrimination that starts and feeds, especially among the new generations, through increasingly violent and prejudicial language. Schools and all educational agencies are called to a common effort to combat discrimination and spread a healthy culture of relationships”, he concludes.