“He was eating a sandwich with friends and then a fight broke out with a group of children like him – says, on the threshold of the Santobono emergency room, the father of 12-year-old stabbed the other night in the Piazza Municipio area – They told me he could die, but the baby is fine now, thanks be to God. I spoke very little to my son, now I’m bringing him lunch». The “child”, as his father calls him, is in stable condition, hospitalized in the pediatric surgery department and surrounded by the affection of his parents, under close clinical observation. He had arrived here on Saturday evening, at 10 pm, with a resuscitation ambulance from Pellegrini, where he had received first aid for various back and stab wounds, one of which was deeper on the left. The one that has affected a lung and caused air to penetrate the cavity that separates the two lungs, that is where the heart is located.
Often, more and more often, the Pediatric Emergency Department becomes a Gomorrah-style set of scenes. “To go eat a sandwich, you see what happened.” The 12-year-old’s mother, red hair and tears on her face, could hardly believe in hell before her eyes in the Santobono emergency room on the evening of 11 March. Her son was on a stretcher, bleeding. It is the drift of the violence of the little ones that is spreading in the city. More than juvenile violence, practically infantile. Instead, the father of the twelve-year-old is resigned and relieved at the same time. In these hours, he goes back and forth between Forcella and Santobono. «Today – he resumes in dialect – all the kids in Naples are in these conditions in the middle of the street unfortunately. I think my son is not the first nor the last to arrive here in those conditions. It all happened to Town Hall square. A passer-by saw it, divided them and brought my son here to the hospital». Without the intervention of the aforementioned “passerby”, the dispute between children in Piazza Municipio – which broke out outside a low-cost American food pub (that is, suitable for the pockets of teenagers) – could have led to even worse results.
“Subjected to a CT scan – explain the doctors of the Neapolitan pediatric center – it was shown that the blow just grazed the lung, not causing damage to the lung tissue, but reaching the surrounding tissues”. In short, the child was and is in stable conditions and is not in danger of life, but the injury suffered could have caused very serious damage. Yesterday morning the chief of pediatric and emergency surgery of Santobono, John Gaglione, he went to the hospital in person to check on the boy’s condition. Above all, it should be avoided that the communication between the pulmonary and mediastinal cavities with the outside of the body becomes a vehicle for infections. A good closure of the wound must be ensured. The Carabinieri of the Napoli Centro company are investigating the matter. The aggressor, already identified, would be a 12-year-old of the same age, and therefore not attributable: together with other friends he would have crossed paths with the victim, whom he only knew by sight. Trivial reasons would be the basis of a quarrel which then unleashed unprecedented violence.
“We are all in shock,” he explains Joseph Fedele, Pellegrini’s surgeon who was the first to rescue the boy – in recent years we have seen the age of these boys who are victims of stabbings and violence go down more and more. Usually these are 16 or 17 year olds. Now we get to 12 or 13, when we are little more than children. They roam the streets armed with knives in a dimension of presumed amusement ready for battle even for no particular reason. Families, schools and institutions have a duty to ask themselves what to do to curb this drift which has taken on the contours of a real social emergency. A worrying escalation ». According to data from Pellegrini, whose emergency room led by Eugenio Bellinfante it is the most frequent destination, the crimes that minors are most often victims of are thefts and intentional injuries, both in the 0-13 and in the 14-17 age group. The latter often also suffer robberies and threats. While among the youngest, after threats, sexual violence is more frequent.
Read the full article
on Il Mattino