‘Ndrangheta and The Street: Experiential Group with Reggio Calabria Flying Squad Policemen

Abstract

The Calabrian Mafia seems to be animated by a hunger for power with no precedent in other crime organizations, and an ability to hide its presence so much to make it an obvious and inevitable component of the decreed social system, deeply crept into the community cohabitation norms. In the study, we have aimed at investigating the Reggio Calabria flying squad policemen's representations and lived experiences. The qualitative analysis of the text, carried out through dedicated software, has pointed out two super codes (aggression to social connections within solitude; no freedom encloses paranoia). In other words, “solitude” as lived experience is spatially contained in “aggression to connections” and “the absence of freedom” encloses the lived experience of constant and systematic danger (“paranoia”). This means that the emotional elaboration on Mafia, carried out during the group process, has highlighted thinking categories connected to the coercion of relational space which articulate themselves along the emotional dimensions of solitude and paranoid anguish. In our last working session, the participants revealed all their internal contradictions and the confusion ‘Ndrangheta causes in them, since on one hand they have to fight against it, and on the other they try to prevent it from affecting them, thus risking to escape not only the Mafia, but the relation they have with the world.