In September, French students began filling the streets to protest overcrowded classrooms, cuts and austerity.
By 6 October, more than 260,000 had taken to the streets across the country. From there, the wave spread. In Spain, people protested against a housing emergency that demonstrators call “legalised theft”; in Belgium and Portugal, against the rising cost of living. In Albania, the uprising began in response to the sell-off of the protected coastline at Zvërnec to make way for a luxury resort project linked to investors close to the White House. This is happening in a country that has already leased its territory to Italy to detain migrants in CPRs (immigration detention centres).
Different languages and slogans that seemed indecipherable to the adult world just a few weeks ago now offer us a way to understand a generation raised amid permanent crises, expected to be flexible and productive without being offered a future. A generation that, as education and welfare are cut back, is being presented with rearmament and war as its horizon. In Germany, conscription has returned, and thousands of young people have taken to the streets to declare that they do not want to become “cannon fodder”. It is younger generations who are leading the protests against the economic violence of a society preparing for war.
In October, the wave reached Italy.
As early as Friday, 16 October, thousands of students across the country had gone on strike against war, racism and the “barracks-style school”. The mobilisation continued on Saturday and Sunday, escalating the confrontation. The response was the same everywhere: preventive measures imposed on minors before demonstrations had even begun, hundreds of young people stopped and identified, and detentions and charges following the disproportionate use of force.
In Milan, at the heart of a city synonymous with luxury and finance, clashes with the police broke out, shop windows were smashed and stores were looted. These are the images that dominated television news and that the government used to build its new decree, as if they were the only things worth seeing. But these acts do not emerge from a vacuum. They take place amid everyday violence that never makes the front pages: the violence experienced by those growing up without a home or an income, stopped because of how they look, watching their schools fall apart while rearmament is funded, and knowing that the future promised to their parents will never come. Those who ask us to look only at the shattered shop windows are asking us to ignore everything else.
Three days later, the Council of Ministers approved this government’s eighth security decree. The measures include:
- a new offence of “organised violence at public demonstrations”, punishable by two to five years in prison;
- the extension of preventive detention to minors;
- fines for parents, including those whose children are below the age of criminal responsibility.
- an additional 500 military personnel deployed in Milan until the end of the year.
This is not a response to an emergency. It is a method.
According to an approximate count, since taking office the government has introduced around sixty new criminal offences or increased penalties. The script has already been written. In September 2023, following the events in Caivano, another decree lowered the thresholds for pre-trial detention of minors, extended urban exclusion orders (Daspo) to fourteen-year-olds and police warnings to twelve-year-olds, and penalised parents for their children’s school absenteeism.
The most measurable result?
The number of minors held in juvenile detention facilities rose from 381 at the end of 2022 to 572 at the end of 2025: an increase of 50 per cent, with juvenile facilities becoming overcrowded for the first time. Every time a social contradiction erupts, the dose is increased. As Osservatorio Repressione writes, public order has become “the favourite drug of a power that no longer knows what else to invent”.
And so every social fracture becomes another chapter in the criminal code: those who fall behind find a uniform waiting for them, those left alone find a cell, and those who protest find a new offence.
Who is this decree really aimed at?
We know, because we meet these young people every day. They are the sons and daughters of the places where we live, children of families who have arrived from elsewhere, second-generation young people growing up in the outskirts, and unaccompanied minors who have already crossed borders and passed through reception centres. They are the ones more likely than others to be stopped and identified because of their skin colour or the neighbourhood they live in.
Preventive detention applied to minors in “crowded” places, on the basis of presumed dangerousness, risks turning a group of teenagers gathering in a public square into grounds for suspicion. Fines imposed on parents, meanwhile, hit hardest those who are already struggling to make ends meet. For many migrant families, such a penalty affects the entire household, including their residence permit and housing.
We see it in our own cities, too, where short-term rentals and tourism-driven gentrification push residents out while military personnel patrol neighbourhoods. Militarisation does not solve problems; it moves them to a darker alley or a more distant suburb, out of sight of tourists and voters.
We know where we stand.
We stand with families who receive a phone call from police headquarters in the middle of the night: your child is here with us. Mothers and fathers who have crossed the city without knowing what awaited them, often having to work out what was happening in a language that is not their own. Families who have never been asked how they live, how much they earn or what future they imagine for their children, but who are now also being asked to pay, despite already precarious circumstances that often amount to outright exploitation.
We stand with those who build relationships in their neighbourhoods every day, relationships that no decree can replace.
For us, security means having someone who knows you by name, a home, a decent income and a school that works.
It means knowing that, if you arrive somewhere alone, there is a community that sees you. This is what we try to build every day by opening our homes and sharing meals, language and time: not assistance, but reciprocity. It is the exact opposite of a decree that treats an entire generation, as we wrote when reporting on Ceuta, “as a public order problem rather than a question of human dignity”.
The security we need is passed from hand to hand. Here, as everywhere, oltremanizzare means recognising ourselves in others and acting together.
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