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 188

devils, or monsters. Trait characterization aims at describing a group according
to personal elements that are extremely negative and therefore unacceptable in
a given society. The rhetorical attribution tends to portray the components of a
group as transgressors of fundamental norms and deviants. Political labels are used
to denote a political group that threatens the constituent values of a collective,
and for this reason the members of that group are totally rejected because they
are dangerous. A fourth process of delegitimization is known as outcasting and
involves rhetorical categorization into groups that violate the pivotal shared social
norms, referring to social actors who are not organized, such us murderers, thieves,
terrorists, or maniacs. Finally, delegitimization by group comparison occurs when
a highly negative label is assigned to a group; the label is symbolic and represents
the most undesirable group of a certain culture, such us vandals or barbarians. In
general, while some groups are categorized negatively but continue to be part of
the society, delegitimization is a social phenomenon that indicates that a particular
group exists only outside the boundaries of commonly accepted groups.

10.5.3 Method: Data and Tools

The data of our study are defined by demonstrators' testimony and public hearings
given during the first trial in Genoa from 12 October 2005 to 14 July 2008. The
Bolzaneto trial produced n D 179 public hearings with an audio record of 468 h
of juridical conversations; n D 361 witness reports were collected, and n D 208
demonstrators spoke during the trial, classified as 162 males and 46 females
(average age 25.8; age range 16-51). The transcripts of witness textual data were
processed using Atlas-ti, a software analysis program.

10.5.4 Results

The analysis, which focused on the narratives produced by n D 208 demonstrators,
representing 57 % of the entire sample of witnesses present at the trial, shows that
references to phenomena of delegitimization constitute n D 1,183 out of a total of
208 testimonials, with an average of 5.7 for each demonstrator.
The use of political labels occurs most frequently, with a total of 367 mentions,
in particular for the environmental delegitimization with 162 mentions in 208 cases.
Trait characterization follows with a total of 341 mentions, while the remaining
labels were 203 outcasting , 174 group comparison , and 98 dehumanization .In
the present study, next to the classic assumption exposed by Bar-Tal's theory, two
new forms of delegitimization have emerged from this analysis: the first consists
in making the delegitimized group assume a specific behavior; in the second, the
delegitimizing group uses rhetoric that refers to hostile symbolic frames. This
new conception of delegitimization leads us to differentiate and define three types