Giulia and the others: stories of girls taken away from their mothers by judgement

They are many small stories, as small are their protagonists. They occupy the time of a few posts on social media and then disappear, dismissed as private quarrels between separated parents. Yet they are a litmus test of the health of the rule of law governing the judicial machine. One example among many: the family in the woods, which divided Italia but also unveiled the veil on a mechanism that recurs in many other stories, downstream of separations and divorces. Different stories in substance, but not in method: children removed from mothers deemed inadequate, symbiotic, fusional, and fathers assessed with a different, more benevolent yardstick.

This is the elephant in the room, thriving in the name of bigenitoriality and thanks to the ascientific construct of parental alienation and its derivatives, such as 'parental refusal', around which conferences and training courses flourish. Claves often used for revenge, with an identical script: the child's rejection of a parent, almost always the father (but the opposite has also happened: think of the tragedy of the child whose throat was slit in Muggia by the mother he did not want to meet), is read as an anomaly to be corrected. The mother who lives with the child almost always ends up in the dock, accused of being the disturbing element. From there the dam opens: technical consultations signed by psychologists and psychiatrists, reports from social services, measures aimed at 'recovering' the relationship at all costs, even at the price of separation from the mother and her living environment. In a kind of dystopian spiral, children are taken into foster homes to be 'purified' of maternal influences and to foster reunification with the other parent, almost always the inspirer and promoter of the entire procedure.

A drift on which the UN has turned the spotlight and which Spain is now trying to stem: the Council of Ministers chaired by Pedro Sánchez has proposed banning the use of parental alienation and 'any of its variants' in the courts. In Italia something has moved, thanks to the denunciations of activists and feminists, the Femicide Commission of the 18th Legislature that under the chairmanship of Valeria Valente conducted an investigation on the subject and, more recently, the combative Garante per l'Infanzia Marina Terragni. But in the courtrooms the phenomenon persists.

Any examples? Giulia, in Naples. Three years of life with her mother, a dispute with her Romanian father that crosses borders until it reaches the Supreme Court. It is not done in time. The Court applies the Hague Convention and transfers the child to Romania. In between, a hospitalisation suspends everything just for a few days. The mother speaks of trauma, tries to stop the vicious circle. But there is nothing to be done: Giulia is transferred amid crying and shouting. When she will see her mother again is not known: usually torn babies are forever.

After Naples there is Padua. Here too a child, Alba, here too the father's rejection, reports, consultations, evaluations. Until the decision to intervene anyway, to 'reconstruct' the relationship. The passage is the same: the minor's discomfort is read as something to be corrected, the relationship with the mother as an obstacle. The tear becomes automatic: social workers are about to knock on his door and a court ruling has decreed that public force can be used. A procedure, moreover, condemned several times by case law, which has rebuked the use of police and carabinieri to take the children away. A common-sense approach but, since the infamous child of Cittadella (Padua) in October 2012 onwards, the little ones continue to be grabbed hand and foot and taken away.