Giving Voice to Silence: A Study of State Violence in Bolzaneto Prison during the Genoa G8 Summit - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 182

the situation. In fact, the atmosphere created in prison was at the root of much of
the unjust behavior and evil actions (Zimbardo 2007 ). Many demonstrators arrested
by the police were subjected to a reign of violence and abuse. Detainees suffered
fractured ribs, concussions, head injuries, verbal abuse, and ill treatment. They were
forced to run the gauntlet between rows of guards swinging clubs, subjected to sleep
deprivation, and tortured with burning cigarettes. In addition, they were compelled
to strip naked and remain standing for up to 30 h. They were then either denied
any sort of medical treatment, the right to an attorney, and contact with family
and were made to wait in conditions of deprivation of basic needs such as warmth,
liquid, and elimination, and women were denied basic feminine hygiene products.
Detainees were also forced to sing fascist songs (Zamperini and Menegatto 2011 ).
The suffering and humiliation was all the more severe because demonstrators did
not understand what was happening. Most of them did not even know why they
were there because many were foreigners, for example, from Germany, France,
Britain, Spain, Austria, the USA, and a number of other countries, and they did
not speak Italian. They included journalists, students, artists, and representatives of
organizations such as Human Rights Watch or Indymedia journalists. This segment
from a public hearing explains the situation well: “But we tried to ::: well to tell
him that we had nothing to do with what had happened, we did not understand why
we were there, why we had been beaten ::: ”(S.G.B.).

10.3 The Black Hole and the Breaking of the Community

Silence

The metaphor of the black hole explains well the workings of Bolzaneto prison.
Nothing escapes from a black hole. In fact, silence has shrouded Bolzaneto for a
long time. Several reasons explain the deafening silence.
At the macro level, government institutions, some political parties, the police
force, and the mainstream mass media said that there had been no human rights
violations, consistently rejecting the demonstrators' accounts to protect and defend
the Italian state from slanderous accusations. But this was a political strategy
designed to avoid facing up to what really occurred restricted to minimizing
the facts and blaming demonstrators (Noelle-Neumann 1993 ; Zamperini 2010 ).
Such misinformation and cover-up have created a culture of denial (Cohen 2001 ).
According to Stanley Cohen (Cohen 2001 ), denial includes the spheres of cognition ,
not acknowledging and rejecting the validity of the facts, what actually happened;
emotion , not feeling in order not to be disturbed; morality , not recognizing
wrongness or taking any responsibility for events; and action , not taking active
steps in response to the facts, for example, remaining indifferent to atrocities by
not taking action against it. Also, when somebody has sometimes discussed G8,
the communication and the use of the language have shown excessive attention to
avoiding the use of words that may be disturbing for a democratic state such as,