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 194

On the basis of this research, we suggest that therapeutic jurisprudence can also
be extended to cases of state-sponsored violence. As has been widely documented
(Krug et al. 2002 ;Minow 1998 ), the victims of such violence have their basic
human needs compromised: their sense of security, positive identity, self-efficacy,
and social bonds. In fact, as we have demonstrated in the case of the G8 Summit in
Genoa, violence was exercised within a sociopolitical context that sought, through
processes of delegitimization, to represent the victims as a foreign body to the
moral and legal community. In these situations, suffering occurs on two levels: the
physical body and psychosocial recognition (Zamperini and Menegatto 2013 ). Even
unconsciously, often the victims feel they are “wrong,” as if what they experienced
was somehow deserved because of personal characteristics or actions taken.
For this reason, the victims expect justice to restore their rights and ensure fair
compensation, but above all, recognition of the oppressed group is also important
(Garapon 2002 ). In fact, the victims of collective and political violence often
experience a sense of isolation within their community, even among their friends
and family, and they feel that their dignity has been violated by the institutions that
have delegitimized and labeled them as “deviants” or “criminals.” It follows that
the victims have a desperate dual need: (a) to regain their dignity and honor
through collective reparations in which their private truth is validated so that it
becomes a public truth; (b) to obtain acknowledgement of the wrong, the suffering,
and to ensure that it is assumed as a part of social memory. It is important that
both collective reparations and acknowledgement take place in a common space
having a common function where collectivity converges in the same direction:
perpetrators and victims must shape a common memory or a common element for
the construction of historical truth. To that end, the victims may find in the legal and
institutional sphere (juridical or innovative as in the South African TRC) a place
for a process of reparation and acknowledgement. Moreover, a trial may serve to
foster an expression of a plurality of different points of view, coming to a common
construction of meaning thanks to a third subject above the parties (Garapon 2002 ).
During a trial, victims have the opportunity to show themselves and tell their
story. This process frees the victims from the status of inferiority to which they have
been relegated, regaining the right to speak and to be heard. They pass from a state
of passivity to a state of active agent. Such a perspective lends great importance to
their testimony, which is not limited to the reconstruction of the facts but becomes a
tangible proof that the victims' words are again active and taken into consideration.
The testimony becomes the psychological rescue of a life wrecked by historical
events, and the narrative is the primary tool for the reconstruction of the identity.
Through their testimony, victims regain consciousness and an active role in the
construction of the historical truth of their experience. Obtaining the perception of
the effectiveness and importance of the storytelling , the experience of the narrative
becomes an object of communication. With this transformation, the person is in a
position to lighten the weight of his or her own pain, previously endured in solitude.
And if the listener is an official audience as in a legal trial, the audience creates the
conditions whereby the violent experience of the victim is inserted into a political
narrative that can give meaning and illumination to the events and give voice to the
silent and obscured violence.