Images of fear in political philosophy and fairy tales: Linking private abuse to political violence in human rights discourse

Unveiling hidden interactions between imagination and fantasy in narratives of violence

In modern philosophy and political thought, imagination and fantasy have been usually differentiated one from the other as different faculties that characterize the human mind. While imagination seems to be based on intellective norms, fantasy appears to be irrationally disconnected from reality. However, veiled and misleading interactions meld these two determinations. This article is thus aimed at underlining the veiled relationship between (philosophical) imagination and (fictional) fantasy, introducing a new viewpoint in the understanding of the private/public violations of human rights. In particular, the article is interested to stress how both political theory and fictional tales have a common source while narrating the genealogy of fear in the context of family life. It is traditionally the first place where submission, discrimination, and subjection are experienced, differently from the political sphere that is considered the prior space where liberty can be practiced but only by few (male) fellows. The comparison between philosophical images and fantastic pictures will exemplify better these arguments, linking symbolically the portrait of the wolf in political treaties and in folk tales.

In the history of Western thought, Aristotle signaled a constitutive divide between the rational and the fantastic, marking a distinction between mythos and logos with the aim to separate conceptual thought from a narrative description of origins. Logos was meant as a theoretical construct, able to elaborate rational categories and analytic frameworks in a systematic and logical way, ascertaining whether a proposition was true or not. Aristotle continues, however, to identify the word fantasy with the idea of imagination, conceived as the capacity to produce images that derive from a sensorial experience, without being conditioned by it.

Radicalizing this tradition in modernity, Kant separates imagination as a rational faculty from fantasy, understood as the capacity to shape images freely without any reference to reality. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, fantasy becomes deprived of any theoretical relevance because it is untrue, contrary to imagination, which is understood as a human faculty that contributes to reproduce images of things in the mind. Productive imagination is based on epistemic rules, differently from fantasy that referred only to aesthetic canons.

Contemporary theorists have reconsidered this bias, stressing the importance of imagination in political thought (Arendt, 1978; Bloch, 1995) as well as the interest in connecting morality to aesthetics through the medium of fantasy. For instance, in Poetic Justice, Nussbaum (1995) argues that emotions and imagination, as articulated in literary texts, play an important role in the establishment of the public sphere, the formation of political judgment, and the constitution of the democratic will of the citizens. Following this line, Chiara Bottici (2014) has recently elaborated an idea of “imaginal politics,” marking a clear distinction between imagination (an individual faculty) and imaginary (a social content) with the intent to underline the transformative potential that the imaginal comprises for the enhancement of present democracies. Therefore, the necessity to overcome the too restrictive traditional distinction between imagination and fantasy has also induced contemporary philosophers (Taylor, 2004) to thematize the notion of social imaginaries as those cultural constructs that refer to collective representations and visions of the world, having the function to orient and mobilize social actors.

Recent philosophical perspectives have thus indicated a paradigm shift in respect to previous debates on the polarity between imagination and fantasy, recognizing imagination’s emotional valence as well as fantasy’s epistemological significance. However, a possible link between imagination and fantasy, when narratives of fear and representations of dystopias are reported in the public sphere with a reference to the private realm, has not yet been sufficiently investigated. In particular, the role that fantasy—and not only of productive imagination—plays in philosophical treatises has not yet been fully examined, especially when rationality does not seem powerful enough to design abstract images (i.e. concepts) or to reduce social imaginaries, which refer to the phylogenesis of violence as a human attitude and fear as a reactive individual response to a real or presumed danger. Actually, the experience of fear finds ontogenetically its roots in the childhood of any person and in the domestic interiors. This is why philosophers and political thinkers turned to literature and arts in order to display intuitive and experiential concepts, although avoiding rationally any personal or emotional involvement.

Despite the effort to trace a clear disciplinary separation between theoretical knowledge, empirical facts, and literary narratives, philosophical imagination and fictional fantasy thus have been often contradictorily interwoven in theoretical treatises with the result of anticipating both utopic worlds and violent dystopias.

The interest in rethinking critically the interaction between the rational and the fantastic—which after the psychoanalytic turn in the twentieth century cannot be any longer meant as “irrational” because of its specific subconscious logic—can also contribute to challenge in human rights discourse the classical dichotomy between the private and the public because of the common origin of violence in relations of proximity.

Thanks to the analysis of concealed interconnections between productive imagination, social imaginaries, and literary imaginaries of fear, we might be able to understand immanently the causes that determine the persistence of violence over centuries, starting from the family up to the state, individuating also transformative potentials in politics.

Within this new hermeneutic frame, the emotional language of fantasy acquires a symbolic, heuristic, and epistemic meaning, expressing reality-contents and arising from a generalizable experiential knowledge. Thanks to an innovative interpretation of the images of fear and terror as aesthetically expressed in literature and arts, human rights discourse can individuate the primary root that leads to abuses and (sexual and labor) exploitations, that is, to the intimate spaces of the household.

On the basis of these premises, in the following section, I try to highlight the intrinsic but often hidden interaction, which links productive imagination (the faculty that reason has to determine objects of the mind, that is, concepts) and social imaginaries (common visions of the world that motivate collective actions) to fantastic narratives (fictive representations of objects/subjects, which have apparently a real existence). The aim is to highlight the contiguity between gender-based discrimination and political violence, as narratives of fear and terror conjured in both political treatises and folk/fairy tales. Fictitious representations of fear could be understood as concrete allegations for the recognition of human rights, conceived ex negativo as a concrete expression toward fair human relationships, based on respect, dignity, and the non-humiliation of individuals (Margalit, 1996), starting from everyday life.

The monstrous machine of the Leviathan in Hobbes

Although in classical philosophy fantasy was distinguished from imagination, modern thinkers had to resort to literature, fictional images, and collective imaginaries in order to represent the origins of politics and to evoke the cause of fear and violence. The ambivalent picture of the social contract, as the grounding act determining the initiation of the human consociation, conveys this contradictory dialectic. Philosophers resorted to different social imaginaries, fantasies, and thought experiments with the aim to frame the idea of the social contract as originative concept for political theory, where humans were pictured as equal contactors, staying in the same original condition but in a public space. According to Hobbes, the prelude to government was a bleak state of violence and fear, while agreeing with Locke (who first distinguished political from paternal power) and Rousseau the social contract had to reinforce what already existed in nature. In the contemporary age, Rawls (1971) also had to recur to a thought experiment in order to conceptualize the original position that equal and rational individuals have under the veil of ignorance, when they have to identify universal criteria of justice.

Starting from the common idea of the social contract as a founding pact between human beings, in De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes ([1642] [1651] 1998) instrumentally employs animal shapes in order to evoke an original fear and to affirm the necessity to resort to an absolute monarchy. In his works, Hobbes uses anthropomorphic animals (as was the custom during the Renaissance), re-interpreting them in a political and secular way, whereas previously they were mainly rooted in mythical, classical, fictional, and religious traditions.

The use of animal allegories and metaphors in modern political discourse also can be found in Machiavelli. Resorting to the lessons of ancient Greek and Latin literature—which lies at the basis of his comedies and historical studies (Machiavelli, 1985, 1998)— Machiavelli reframed in The Prince (published posthumously in 1532) humanized animal stories in order to design the dual nature that the ruler must take:

“All the allegory means, in making a teacher half beast and half man, is that a prince must know how to act according to the nature of both, and that he cannot survive otherwise. So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenseless against traps and a fox is defenseless against wolves. Therefore, one must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves (Machiavelli, 2003: 56–57).”

A successful Prince—defined as one who is able to attain efficaciously a predetermined political objective, to keep power, and to maintain the state he conquered—is therefore a mimetic being, a centaur, who knows how to combine the qualities of the lion with the characteristics of the fox, enhancing his ability as “simulator and dissembler.” The Prince is, therefore, a “secret” man living in substantial isolation, despite the multitude around him. But he is not merely a cyborg, fearlessly lion-hearted, which presumably does not feel amorous sentiments. The Prince remains a man. Unlike Hobbes’s Leviathan, as I will stress later, fear of death and the will to survive remain constant key concerns for the Prince. Indeed, men are “wretched creatures” so that “fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective” (Machiavelli, 2003: 54).

Since the sixteenth century, the representation of the animalized body of the politician has been a crucial philosophical and secular allegory in political thought and the attempt to conceive fearless political conditions for citizens under State rules. Although Machiavelli starts from different assumptions (the Florentine republican experience he experienced as a protagonist) and has hidden aims (the unity of the Italian peninsula), both Machiavelli and Hobbes employ animal allegories to exemplify the qualities of the male ruler. Specifically, Hobbes signifies animal conformations in order to support the necessity of legitimizing the role of an absolutist monarch, who must be capable of avoiding fear. For this reason, he must be totally unafraid.

Hobbes introduces thus the monstrous figure of the Leviathan and the aggressive image of the wolf, in order to show the inevitability of individuals, under the fear of death, of signing the social contract. Violence seems to be consequent to fear, which is determined by the threat for humans of losing their own existence. As a symbol of a fearless being, Hobbes takes the mythological figure of the Leviathan, who—like Machiavelli’s ruler—must have a double nature.

Hobbes depicts the dialectic between life and death by resorting to the painful emotion of fear (caused by the sense of danger, risk, harm, and threat) as what human beings feel among themselves, what they experience in respect to the natural environment they live in before the constitution of the State, and what all citizens should feel if they would not respect the law of the ruler they live under because of the possible use of a public force. Hobbes thus transfigures the sovereign into a mythological figure, which is unnatural and mechanical. In the Phoenician culture, the Leviathan was an animal, part of the primogenial chaos. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah described it as a wriggling and twisting snake and a symbol of the pharaoh’s power. For this reason, the Leviathan was identified as an enemy to the people of Israel and therefore of God. Hobbes re-interprets politically this ambivalent biblical representation, empowered by mechanical features. Modern natural philosophers were in fact attracted by the “big machinery” and humans-as-machines theories, as in the case of Francis Bacon, for whom Hobbes worked as a secretary (Rossi, 2001).

The archaic/modernized figure of the Leviathan appeared on the title page of the first English edition (1651) in the guise of a giant made up of individuals. In one hand, he brandishes a sword, while in the other he is holding a pastoral. The message is that the only way to salvation is through obedience to the Imperium. Beside the cover, the name Leviathan appears in the Introduction of the book, where it is presented as an “artificial animal,” which is created by humans and therefore seems to be unnatural:

Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended. (Hobbes, 1972: 4)

But what is very surprising is that the word Leviathan is mentioned only three times in the entire voluminous homonymous text. The lack of further quotations about the initial and grounding political figure of the Leviathan can be perhaps explained by the fact that Hobbes’ aim was to emphasize, in a powerful, imaginative, and emotionally convincing way, the mechanically hybridized animal part that the ruler should have in order to be able to protect humans from fear so that his government was per se legitimized. In the end, the Leviathan seems to be a sort of deus ex machina, an artifice or a sort of god falling mechanically from above—according to the Greek–Latin theatrical tradition—who was able to resolve almost inextricable problems.

However, one question remains: Why did Hobbes resort to fictional personifications and literary images in order to explain the rise of politics? This question lies at the core of innumerable studies. In The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt ([1938] 2008) rejects an interpretation of the Leviathan as a hybrid fusion between a god and an animal, preferring a political and secular explanation of the case. Schmitt intends, thus, to offer a “true philological” clarification so that the Leviathan becomes symbolically the image of a “worldly power,” which is higher, stronger, and undivided compared to individual powers.

Yet, Schmitt’s analysis does not put enough emphasis on the ambivalences that characterize fear as emotional residue, social constrain, and political potential. De facto, fear continues to persist in the lives of citizens preciselly because of the persistence of a symbolic imaginary and the political materialization of the Leviathan’s animal/mechanical power. Namely, the Leviathan recalls perpetually the echo of the violence he originally suppressed and at the same time he continues to legitimize in the political domain against any transgressor. The ruler—in order to be fearless and strong—must transform part of his body into an animal or a machine because a man could not be exempt from fear and terror. In the end, the Leviathan can only be a crossbreed artifact: neither a man nor a beast nor only a machine, while the fragility of the human condition means vulnerability, awareness and precarity.

Like many Hobbesian commentators, Schmitt underestimates the semantic link that connects mythological traditions, social imaginaries, and fanciful representation of fear in the conceptual definition of the political framework. This reflection lies at the basis of Derrida’s (2009) work on The Beast and the Sovereign, where the author points out immanent contradictions connoting Hobbes’ idea of sovereignty, as showed in the dialectic between humans and animals and the reference to unconscious forces, while invoking images of fear. However, Derrida does not reflect upon possible connections between public imaginaries and private involvements in terms of existential experiences and public dangers.

It is no coincidence that in his late years, in contrast to the principles enounced in Leviathan (how political order ought to be constituted), Hobbes recurred to another biblical image of fear: the Behemoth (written in 1668 but published posthumously in 1681), a terrifying creature that can be defeated only by its creator. The Behemoth becomes for Hobbes the tragic emblem of the chaos (how political government ought not to be) produced by the civil war in England, which deeply affected his life. In both cases, symbolic imagination was a newly expression of an individualized “subject of desire,” who in modernity became the contradictory symbol of both autonomy and unrelatedness.

The asocial wolf in Hobbes’ philosophy

Hobbes not only appealed to the Leviathan and the Behemoth for the explication of the emotion of fear but also mentioned the terrifying image of the wolf as an evil and asocial being. This topic can be found in Hobbes’ early works and in particular in De Cive (Hobbes, [1642] 1998), where imaginaries of fear and violence were conceptualized in a realist and materialist sense.

Traditionally, Hobbes is remembered as the author of the famous Latin phrase: homo homini lupus, which means that “man is a wolf to man.” The wolf was ascended to an anthropological symbol of human selfishness and pessimism so that over the centuries Hobbes’ utterance become almost a reductive caricature of the thinker. Yet, some myths—as in the case of quotations from Leviathan—must be debunked.

By splitting the De Cive into three parts (Of Freedom, Of Domination, and Of Religion), and anticipating political themes that later will be developed in Leviathan, Hobbes points out that natural laws are not binding in a pre-social state so that it is not possible to ensure the safety and protect the lives of citizens. For this reason, the transition toward a civil state becomes a necessity inherent to the very survival of the human species, according to precise rules and aiming for peace. In this context, in the initial dedication (Epistola dedicatoria) addressed to “His Excellency William, Earl of Devonshire,” the ambivalent phrase “Homo homini Deus, & homo homini lupus” is quoted. However, this statement appears only in the Latin version of the author’s draft of De Cive, while it is not mentioned in the English translation of the work (known as The Citizen), published later in 1647 with some changes.

The same goes for other quotes, cited as general expressions of Hobbes’ thought. For example, the phrase “a war of all against all” appears only in the English edition of The Citizen (Chapter 1, XIII), while the phrase bellum omnium in omnes is found only in the Latin edition of the De Cive. These two expressions are completely absent in Leviathan, as such as the proposition state of nature.

These philological details can shed light on the use of certain metaphorical expressions in Hobbes’ political theory, but above all they can help to understand the stereotyped popularity of certain imaginative utterances, although they are so little mentioned by the author. An explanation of the vulgate, often approximate, of these terms can lie in the emotional content and the expressive power they have in the collective imagination. They keep an evocative potential of fear and violence, which any individual constantly experiences. This thesis can be supported by referring to the instrumental utilization that political philosophy and widespread narratives have made of the figuration of the wolf as a ravenous and lonely beast.

The matrix of the utterance homo homini lupus is proverbial and theatrical. It derives from the Latin comedy Asinaria (The Comedy of Donkeys), written by Titus Maccius Plautus around AD 206 (Plautus, 2006). Hobbes includes in the Latin version of his treatise on the citizen Plautus’ commentary, which was quite popular during the Renaissance. As a matter of fact, Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576)—a mathematician, astrologer, and philosopher—also mentioned in his work Proxeneta, seu de Prudentia civili (The Mediator, or Civic Prudence, published posthumously in 1627), the phrase quoted from Asinaria: “Memineris Plautini illius: Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit” (Cardano, 1630: 321) (“a man is a wolf to his fellow man, not a man, when the other does not know of what character he is”).

When Hobbes used Plautus’ motto (it is well known that he used to translate Latin literature and Greek tragedies), he was probably aware of the metaphorical significance the expression had. The powerful and imaginative representation of the wolf immediately reminds the danger that a human being can find in a dark forest and the fear that he can feel toward an uncontrollable and unpredictable enemy. It is a “natural” danger that adults should be aware of since early childhood. However, the conceptual symbolization of fear as part of human ontology could have had genealogical roots in Hobbes’ life experience so that a particular sensitivity toward the perception of danger could have been later rationally translated into a philosophical discourse and political thought.

Actually, Hobbes was born prematurely in Westport in 1588, due to the fear experienced by his mother, terrified by the advance of the Invincible Armada during the Anglo-Spanish war, which spread terror over the country. Hobbes often recalled his birth, referring biographically to the genealogy of dread: “And so much fear my mother conceived at that time that she gave birth to twins: myself and Fear. That, I think, is why I loathe my country’s enemies, love peace & the Muses & courteous companions.” (Hobbes, 1673) Once the fear toward birth is overcome, thanks to the affirmation of life, the memory of the mortal danger reappears rationalized in a process of reiterated victimization through the image of an authoritarian and intrepid sovereign, who strikes fear into people at the political level in order to remove it from their lives, maintaining peace.

In Hobbes, fear acquires both ontogenetic and phylogenetic features, although the worry that a child feels since his or her birth is not prehistoric but rooted in his or her life contexts. Hobbes was not able to give public voice to the sense of private dread he experienced so that he referred the emotion of danger only to a prehistoric state of nature or a disordered politics. He thus sublimated philosophically the terror toward the political monsters of the Invincible Armada with the fear toward ancestral monsters and archetypal wild beasts that populate one’s imagination during childhood. Consequently, Hobbes’ metaphysics of fear can be considered as a combination of an archaic terror and a personal worry, which is functional to the constitution of an absolutist politics, which—if so understood—cannot be democratic. In Hobbes, the ruler seems to be able to guarantee safety and peace in the political realm. Yet who can ensure the respect of citizens in the private spaces, if it is true that men remain wolves toward their fellows? Yet despite the “protection” of the Leviathan—a man, animal, and machine at the same time—fear continues to persist in politics and everyday life.

An intrinsic but disguised interaction between conceptual imagination, social imaginary, literary fantasy, and personal experiences thus runs like a scarlet thread through Hobbes’ theorization of politics. Radicalizing this point and unveiling an immanent tension between the public and the private from the viewpoint of the critique of human rights violation, in the next section I intend to refer to occurrences of fear experienced in childhood, as they are disguised in fairy tales, which—as I have tried to expose above—often lie at the core of philosophical conceptualizations. Hobbes had to resort to fantasy in order to rationalize the essence of politics: philosophy was not able to represent in an abstract manner unspeakable sentiments and frightening emotions.

All the better to eat you with: Fantasy and fear in the household

Fantasy and related derivatives have been mainly associated with aesthetics, that is, to literature and arts. In particular, many authors (Jackson, 2008; Todorov, 1975; Van Peer, 1995) have underlined the constitutive ambivalence connoting the idea of fantastic: it fluctuates between being and nothingness, provoking disorientation in the reader, who is trapped between the reality constructed by the author and the untruth in ordinary life. Fantastic is something that appears but is not yet consciously rationalized. It differs both from the author and the existing world, being estranged as a reality in it. However, while manifesting concretely, the fantastic alludes to preserved meanings, which have not yet been elucidated. The imaginative faculty of fantasy becomes the vector of a possible unreal world, which is parallel and interactive to the space we live in. It produces something that emerges under variegated, shimmering, and unsteady shapes. Yet, the power of mental/material transfiguration kept in fantasy alludes to hopes and conflicts knowledgeable in the real world.

Fantasy, fantastic, phantasmagory, phantom, and phenomenon share an equal etymological Greek root: phenomenon means what appears. However, while in aesthetics the idea of fantasy refers to “untrue things,” in philosophy the concept of phenomenology relates to a complex epistemic process that a subject develops toward the objects of knowledge. The most important thinkers, who thematized the notion of phenomenology (although in very different ways), were Hegel (the becoming of the spirit in a continuous alienating dialectic between subject/object) and Husserl (the analysis of the structures of consciousness as intentionally experienced from the first-person point of view).

Starting from an immanent interaction between fantasy and phenomenology, my interest is in tracing a bridge between some aesthetic and theoretical traditions, underlining a new understanding of fantasy in the scrutiny of human rights abuses. In the following section, I will try to re-appropriate the masked reality-contents that the fantastic keeps hidden, taking as an example the narratives of folk/fairy tales.

In literature, a definitional difference is traced between fables (proverbs with a moral content about the controversial nature of human beings) and fairy tales (considered a pure product of fantasy). Extravagant characters—such as ogres, fairies, gnomes, and animals, according to local folklore—usually drive fables and fairy tales. But while the moral maxim in fables is explicit, the unspoken message in fairy tales is vicious, multifaceted, and even subliminal. This is the case of the figure of the wolf, which was also taken as a negative symbol in modern philosophy, as argued above.

In ancient Greek literature, the fabulist Aesop (2002) (born in 620 BC) makes metaphors of the wolf in 26 fables. The most famous is The Shepherd’s boy and the Wolf, whose final maxim sounds as “You cannot believe a liar even when he tells the truth” because the wolf is perceived as a tangible danger. The same happens with the Latin writer Phaedrus (born in the first century AD) (Phaedrus, 1992), who in the fable The Wolf and the Lamb addresses the motto to those “Who never want to admit how wrong they are and with any pretense always try to oppress the innocent.” The poor wolf is once again the example of a maleficent being. The reason for the persistent negative representation of the wolf can perhaps be found in its predatory nature.

It is a matter of fact that popular traditions have usually painted the wolf as a diabolical and malevolent being that can be transmuted into a human being as a werewolf. On the contrary, recent ethological studies and life experiences (Ellis and Junor, 2010; Living with Wolves, 2015) have helped to dispel this ancestral myth, emphasizing the contrary since the wolf does not attack humans directly, unless it feels threatened by them. Rather, wolves try to keep away from humans as much as possible. In contrast to the gloomy depiction offered by Plautus and quoted by Hobbes, the wolf appears a clever, sociable, and responsible predator, organized in packs, according to a strict hierarchy that regulates collective life, where each is dependent on the other for their common survival. Nevertheless, as we have argued above, the wolf has been mainly represented as the symbol par excellence of individual egoism and the manifestation of a destructive force so that the social contract—according to Hobbes—would have been the sole salvation to exit from the state of nature, to preserve human life, and to legitimate an absolutist government. But this is not the sole representation of a terrifying wolf that modernity has delivered to us.

Trying to attribute a meaning to the Volksgeist and to emphasize the cognitive value of fantasy (according to the romantic dictates), the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (supporters of the German democratic movement) gathered 200 folk stories into the Fairy Tales for Children and Families, published in two volumes between 1812 and 1822 (Grimm and Grimm, 1976). Fairy tales were meant as a fantastic, spontaneous, archetypical, and unreflective creation of the folk-spirit, where protagonists had features, which did not truly exist in nature. In German fairy tales, the myth of the big bad wolf reemerges as it was pictured in ancient fables and redefined in modern political philosophy. The most world-famous fairy tales with the wolf as a protagonist are The Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood, where small and helpless animals and kids are able to survive the risk of life.

Mutatis mutandis, which similarities or differences can be found between these legendary sinister narratives and dark political myths, as outlined above? Possible parallels are recognizable in the representation of power (or evil) through the employment of the body of a male animal. But the main difference consists in the hidden reference that apparently fanciful stories make to indescribable offenses.

For centuries, rational philosophical discourse—meant as a “public” dialogue—has ignored facts and situations of fear related to concrete experiences of violence in the private domain. This denial was due to the fact that the household—where the power of the master was incontrovertible—was considered as a space extrinsic to “common good” and the res publica because its social actors were not considered as human beings and citizens: women, children, and slaves were marginalized, relegated, and ignored by politics.

Contrary to dramatic but temporary political events, domestic abuses are continuously perpetuated in daily life so that they do not dwell merely in a hypothetical original state of nature, which has been removed, thanks to a process of civilization. The apparently fictional image of the wolf-myth signifies, thus, a denied archaic dialectic. The wolf, on one hand, is portrayed as a satanic figure and a wild beast, which brings death and destruction; on the other hand, it is personified as a sacred symbol and a being, which leads to initiation and a hidden knowledge.

Indeed, the wolf is a character which unveils the hypocrisy of masking secrets and brings to light the true nature of fear: it is not only experienced in the primordial state of nature, nor is it due merely to the rising of social insecurities or determined by a totalitarian State. Fear can also be the terror that creeps into the domestic domain. The metaphor of Grimm’s Little Red Riding Hood depicts a painful process of knowledge that adults would never have liked to tell, as revealed in some illuminating passages of the fairy tale, although the language of poetic imagination disguises a tragic truth.

One of the key steps of the story represents the little girl’s doubts when confronted with the wolf in disguise:

“Oh! Grandmother,” she said, “ what big ears you have!”

“All the better to hear you with, my child” was the reply.

“But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!” She said.

“All the better to see you with, my dear.”

“But, grandmother, what large hands you have!”

“All the better to hug you with.”

“Oh! But, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!”

“All the better to eat you with!”

This dialogue signifies not only folkloristic performances and popular fantasy sublimated through collective imagination; it also evokes tragic facts that philosophy, society, and politics have only recently recognized. The fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood concerns unambiguously denied imaginaries related to domestic violence and the occult representation of a “potential enemy within” the household. These disguised messages, sent to oblivious children, contain implicitly heuristic elements, which relate to scenarios from real life.

The “wolf-man” outlined by Hobbes was a human beast that was socially controllable (thanks to the restrain of aggressive instincts, Freud would argue). It was “sedated,” thanks to the formation of human society, the submission to an unquestioned power exercised by the sovereign, and the acceptance of public force in the form of political coercion. The Hobbesian “asocial wolf” turns into Little Red Riding Hood in the guise of a ravenous but “domestic” beast, which enters the house with deception. It is disguised as something else and for this reason is more frightening because it cannot be immediately addressed: it penetrates the house as a familiar and peaceful person. In order to dissimulate its criminal plans, the wolf thus prevents recognition of its true nature by the child. Yet, Little Red Riding Hood perceives the strangeness of the alleged grandmother. But once she doubtfully approaches the wolf, the little girl is swallowed, going to keep company with her real grandmother, who had also been dispatched into the dark belly of the aggressor.

Both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother manage to survive, after experiencing terror of death, thanks to the providential intervention of a (of course male) hunter. This fellow is totally foreign to the family but—on hearing the cries of the victims—was capable of a sudden and decisive action that avoided a certain death for both. The hunter did not shoot directly at the beast, fearing he might kill those who had been swallowed. He merely cuts its belly open. The grandmother and her granddaughter come out dazed and frightened: unaided, they would not have been capable of defeating their aggressor and returning to life. The house illustrates the loneliness of the condition of the two women, who belong to vulnerable generations: the latter because she is a minor and the former because she is old; other members of the family could not have rescued them.

The heuristic and epistemic content of fairy tales

In recent decades, multidisciplinary studies have focused on the meaning that “monsters” and terrifying representations have in our life, rooted in childhood as archetypes. In particular, reflections upon “terror and wonder,” which have characterized the Gothic imagination since the late eighteenth century (Townshend, 2014), have cast new light on the “domestic theatre of fear,” represented in the household. In this context, familiar people can transform themselves into vampires; monstrous beings can occupy the body of well-known people or infest the house; acquitted children can become bedevilment. In bourgeois environments, monstrosity is externalized to unpredictable “enemies” and unexpected events, which cannot concern members of the family. Violence is transfigured as a drama that takes place outside a loving and peaceful household.

However, recent researchers and psychoanalytic studies in Freudian terms (Bettelheim, 1976) have focused on the gory and bloody meanings that are implicit to some fairy tales. Apparently, innocent fairy tales would evoke pedophilia, prostitution, cannibalism, sexual assault, or ancestral forms of terror, from which the human species wanted to run away and become lodged in a political community.

Rereading fairy tales means to recognize in fantasy a cognitive valence and epistemic role, which was until recent years neglected because it was considered as referred to unreal objects and situations. Fantasy is not unrelated to the existing world or merely entrapped in autopoietic logic. It keeps traces of reality in the unsaid and denied that rational languages refuse intentionally or unconsciously to thematize.

Contrary to imagined fables and because of their anthropological roots and morphologic origins (Propp, 2010), folk/fairy tales do not seem to have explicitly educational and moralizing intents so that they had originally specific reference to sexuality. This is the reason why—addressing the fairy tales to children—the Grimm brothers removed all explicit erotic allusions, which also characterize the dark and instinctive motions of gods and heroes in Greek legends. Initially, myths were not stories but narrative Weltanschauungen, which oriented the life of adults and communities.

The imaginative re-elaboration and educational re-interpretation of fairy tales and myths over time has had as a result that generations of children have continued to be captivated by these narratives (perpetuated nowadays through toys, comics, video games, and movies), without appearing afraid or lost because they are “protected” in their reading by parents and teachers. The conviction was that fairy tales would favor children’s evolutionary process, morality, and knowledge, steeling them against fear and helping the development of their creative abilities.

That may be true. However, what might happen when, years later, former children, who have become adults, start to reread alone the same stories that accompanied their childhood? What has changed in the meantime in their fantastic imaginary and cognitive development, once they have been confronted with experiential factors? Adults often realize that they have been fascinated by fairy tales that told the stories of abducted children, who were about to be eaten by an ogre, that is, a possible pedophile (Hansel and Gretel); stories narrating that parents left their children in the woods where they were certain that they would have died of starvation (Tom Thumb); stories of husbands who beheaded their wives and concealed their mutilated corpses (Bluebeard); stories of a stepmother who enslaved her daughter (Cinderella) or even poisoned her out of jealousy (Snow White). It is not only external people, “strangers” (who as deus ex machina often rescue them), who become enemies to children, but rather familiar figures. Only a happy end is heartening: the children were more capable than adults of intervening in difficult situations, using inventive stratagems to survive in unhealthy and dangerous environments, to benefit from their condition, even becoming richer at the end (Tom Thumb). Children are pictured as resistant, resilient, and almost invincible beings, perpetuating the biblical archetype of the minuscule David, victorious over the giant Goliath. The memories of these stories could have helped adults to survive existential difficulties over time, having already overcome many hardships during childhood, at least in relation to what they read, heard, and learned.

However, a radical doubt remains: Do fairy tales refer only to loving parents, who worry about what might happen to their children once they become autonomous and independent in the world? Or do the fantastic metaphors pack an ambivalent and painful message, which refers immanently to a reality that can be only indirectly evocated since the parents would not be able to find the right words to tell their children the truth? How could they explicitly tell their children of the traumas they might have suffered at the hands of their parents during childhood, without disrupting the individual self-confidence, the family dynamics, and child’s psychophysical equilibrium? Or more tragically, how can it rationally be said that one of the parents, or both, can transform himself/herself/themselves into a monstrous wolf, becoming perpetrators?

One of the subtle problems, which emerges clearly with anxiety and worry in rereading fairy tales in adulthood, is that the greatest danger does not come from the darkness of the night or from the impenetrable forest but from the interiors of the household. The forest has been anthropomorphized and become a sociable place: Little Red Riding Hood dawdles fearlessly while picking beautiful flowers in the wood, chatting with wild animals, and walking along in peace. She already met in the forest the wolf, but she did not recognize it as a dangerous enemy. Actually, the girl provided information to the animal about where she was going so that the wolf “thought to himself: ‘What a tender young creature! I must act craftily, so as to catch both’.” But Little Red Riding Hood is worrying that her grandmother could reprimand her for being late because she deviated from the master path. Yet, the forest does not seem threatening. The cause of danger, terror, and death lies within the domestic interiors, invisible to the eyes of most. The household becomes a place of violent oppression, imprisonment, coercion, brutality, and slavery.

The unutterable reality

As argued above, figurations of fear—as represented in mythology, philosophy, and literature—continue to have a tangible valence in the conceptualization of politics in theoretical treatises as well as in the narration of domestic violence, disguised in fairy tales. But until a few decades ago, this phenomenon was theoretically denied because it was considered a merely imaginary narrative, devoid of any heuristic value and contrary to truth.

The unexpected enemy, who violates and devours the child, is presented as an unfamiliar and unknown animal, albeit disguised as a family member. The dangerousness of the apparently well-known person is not immediately visible. He can thus threaten the child or anyone coming near. The child would not have time to organize his or her defense before the attack, fighting against the perpetrator. In traditional war, the enemy is immediately recognizable by the weapons he carries and the uniform that distinguishes him: the battlefield is well defined and everyone knows reciprocally the role played by the “enemy.” This does not happen for abuse within the family since the house is conceived as a protective place but where unexpected dangers can dwell.

Perhaps in Little Red Riding Hood, the physical disguise of the wolf represents the camouflaging of a familiar identity. The transmutation of the wolf into grandmother and the subsequent dramatic revelation evoke another painful mystification: the peaceful grandmother may have always been a wolf, even before she had to manifest as such. The beast evokes a family member or acquaintance, male or female, who enjoyed free access to the house, having been presented as a loving and benevolent person, incapable of violence. In the end, the survival and the growth of the child are related to the death of the wolf (the hunter, once the stomach has freed its prisoners, kills it), that is, the unmasked face of the violator.

Similarly, the persistence of a respectful family (children, parents, relatives, acquaintances) becomes possible only when it is separated from the wolf, that is the beast that had infiltrated and violently concealed itself in the home, swallowing the grandmother and the child. More than the memory of the wolf, however, what remains is the fear that the enemy can reappear suddenly, unannounced or under a new guise. With the murder of the “true” wolf, the repudiation of any form of intra-family violence is underlined, as already stated in Greek–Roman culture as well as in the Jewish–Christian tradition.

Mythological symbols as well as fantasies in fairy tales advocate incontrovertible and untold truths about enduring forms of intra-family violence with the hope of alleviating human suffering, thanks to the establishment of just and fair societies and the respect of fundamental freedoms. The dialectic of love is based on complex learning processes (Honneth, 2007), which can turn into the opposite, due to the lack of respect and recognition that turns into a dehumanizing process toward otherness. Violence nestles in the folds of the intimate relationship of the couple and family, although intimacy is apparently changing as a matter of parity and consensual relationship between human beings (Giddens, 1992) so that marital rape is also punishable.

Domestic violence expands in inter-generational interactions between parents and children; it develops and deteriorates on a daily basis; it spreads like a poison inserted in everyday relations. Intra-family abuses destroy self-esteem, paralyze the will, and overflow tragically into the public sphere as a homicide. The unspeakable offense comes to light, revealing the truth: the family is not always a place of loving protection but rather a space that can be dangerous and harmful to its members. Insecurity pervades every movement so that the household becomes an insecure place that can no longer provide a refuge to a devastated life. Fear contaminates the soul and immobilizes people like a poison. It seems unstoppable. Rape enacted by strangers can be considered a tragic fatality; violence enacted within the family undermines the sense of who we are.

The paradox of violence consists in the affirmation of an absolute and unrelated desire of coercion on the side of the abuser, aimed at destroying step by step the will of the other person, who becomes subjected by the offender. At the same time, the perpetrator needs to keep up a relationship with the victim in order to be able to continue the exercise of his power over her or him (Agnello Hornby and Calloni, 2013). But subjecting the other person, he obliterates the relationship that he wants to maintain. Differently from Butler’s (1997) theory about the reflexivity and the paradox of power, in domestic violence the act to be subjected does not necessarily lead to autonomy but to an escalation of daily coercion up to homicide because of the loss of self-esteem, capabilities, and the sense of danger to self.

Violence becomes a perverse addiction, where the victim and the perpetrator recognize their identity in a mutual, distorted relationship. Violence—different from power (Arendt, 1970)—is paradoxically the main expression of weakness in the use of coercion because no other means is able to subjugate the other person. Yet by radicalizing violence up to the ultimate act (a homicide with gender features, that is, a femicide) (Fregos and Bejarano, 2010), the perpetrator destroys and annihilates the subject/object of his desire and domination, together with himself, who imposed it. Femicide is the most radical form of dehumanization and misrecognition (Gregoratto, 2014).

Yet, domestic violence as an asymmetric dominative power relationship differs if acted against adult partners or children. Children are minors, expecting care and protection from responsible adults, who might transform into sex offenders. They are undefended because they are more vulnerable so that violence can be more easily perpetrated, remaining unreported. However, child abuse does not mean only physical or mental injury, negligent treatment, sexual abuse, or exploitation. It also brings perjuring effects (like posttraumatic stress disorders after a bloody war), which a child witness will suffer constantly throughout his or her existence.

Family abuses have been traditionally relegated to the realm of fantasy or hidden in the tragedy of individual lives. Yet in narratives of violence, the bond between the private realm and the public domain remains incontrovertible as a counter-factual moral allegation for human rights discourse: a democratic politics cannot allow the psychophysical violation of any human being, from domestic/intimate existence up to political/public life.

Domestic violence and the juridification of private issues

The political and legal recognition of sexual and domestic violence as a violation of human rights is recent, dating back only twenty years. It is, thanks to the efforts of battered women, the United Nations (UN) Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna in 1993 and the fourth UN Conference devoted to women’s human rights held in Beijing in 1995 (UN, 1995) that gender-based violence has become the subject of international conventions and a crime that is punishable under national legislations (Calloni, 2002).

Before that, domestic violence was regarded as a purely private matter that even liberal democracies did not have to deal with. Hidden evocations of abuses in the family were not displayed in public discourse as a matter of common concern. The pain of victims did not find a place where it could be heard and healed. Only recently, this inexpressible offense began to lose the connotations of an “unspeakable confidence” (also by Christian Churches), becoming an integral part of public debate at the global level and a constitutive element for the legitimacy of political institutions, able to deliberate and apply ad hoc social policies.

Two conventions on children and women have signified a paradigm shift in international relations and human rights discourse. The UN General Assembly adopted The Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, entered into force in 1990, which affirms in article 19 that

States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child. (UN, 1989)

The Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse reinforces international provisions and policies stating in article 1 that

The purposes of this Convention are to: a. prevent and combat sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children; b. protect the rights of child victims of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse; c. promote national and international co-operation against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children. (Council of Europe, 2007)

More recently, the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, promoted in 2011 by the Council of Europe (2011), focuses specifically on the struggle against domestic abuse, thanks to different kinds of provisions at both the domestic and international levels, adopting a holistic and integrated system, based on keywords such as prevention of the phenomenon, protection of the victims, prosecution of the perpetrators, policies to be applied in order to face the problem as a matter of changing both cultures and patriarchal mentalities. Domestic violence is defined in article 3 as

a. “Violence against women” is understood as a violation of human rights and a form of discrimination against women and shall mean all acts of gender-based violence that result in, or are likely to result in, physical, sexual, psychological or economic harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life; b. “Domestic violence” shall mean all acts of physical, sexual, psychological or economic violence that occur within the family or domestic unit or between former or current spouses or partners, whether or not the perpetrator shares or has shared the same residence with the victim. (Council of Europe, 2011)

Conventions issued by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union have contributed to the increase in a new public awareness of a phenomenon that was until recent years denied or neglected, also because of the shame that humiliated victims feel when revealing their experience: they are afraid that they will not be believed. Fear is always consequent to a traumatic offense. The contents of fanciful tales have shown their concrete nature, revealing secrets never told because of fear of family and social disapproval.

While crime drop benefits men most, in 2012 a US survey reported that the second cause of death for women under 50 is being killed by their spouse or partner (American Bar Association, 2014). In Europe, statistics show that every 3 days, a woman is killed by her current or former partner. Moreover, a survey issued by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) has shown that one-third of 42,000 interviewed women have been subjected to experiences of gender-based violence (FRA, 2014). In particular, a recent Italian survey has reported that “Among the perpetrators of violence, at the first place are former husbands/cohabitants (22.4%), followed by ex-fiancés (13.7%), by husbands or current cohabitants (7.5%) and in the end by current fiancés (5.9%)” (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, 2015).

The unveiling of this social but hidden phenomenon, the effectiveness of international and domestic legislations, the systematic collection of empirical data, a new public sensitivity, which allows victims to speak freely about the abuse they suffered without shame, and provisions for the safeguarding of abused minors or children witness to violence motivate a more complex understanding of the interconnection between fantastic representations, social imaginaries, and conceptual imagination than it was in the past.

The limits of political philosophy in tackling domestic abuses

The analysis of the symbolic, imaginative, and allusive language of folk/fairy tales from the perspective of domestic violence can elucidate a new approach toward social criticism, where morality, justice, and politics can be ex negativo and normatively interwoven against any manifestation of human rights violation, starting from the household.

This new cultural awareness contradicts centuries of thought. Philosophy traditionally conceptualized the family as a space without conflict because it would be based on the order, power, and rules imposed by the pater familias on women, children, and slaves, as Aristotle argues in Politics (Aristotle, 1981). Therefore, only a free man can be a citizen and have a vita activa. Rationality is related to the asymmetric faculty to command so that domestic violence is rationalized as functional to daily practices. Classical philosophy and modern political theory have, therefore, conceived the oikos as a natural and harmonic place before the community and the State, according to a rectilinear model inaugurated by Aristotle and continued dialectically by Hegel. Finally, family was pictured as the “cradle of love.”

The pain that the imposed patriarchal order causes to fellow family members is expelled from the realm of reason and politics, becoming a persistent emotional residuum immanent to myths, tragedies, and fairy tales, which, thanks to books and theatrical representations, continue over centuries to evoke and personify inexplicable offenses that persist in daily experiences.

Contrary to philosophical mystifications, in Greek myths there was a continuum between family violence and political conflicts, as Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone unequivocally manifested. Because politics was meant as a rational proceeding that linearly connected the family to the State, domestic violence disappeared from the realm of politics in the distinction between mythos and logos, remaining perpetuated symbolically in literature and arts. It was not considered as a problem of public concern. Fear was thus thematized in politics but remained unexplicated in the family domain because considered “private” and therefore not “public.” Violence in the private realm was meant as uninfluential and worthless with respect to political conflicts in the celebration of male warriors, who could die as heroes.

Yet, a mythical memory is reactivated when scary monsters populate the imagination during childhood, evoking archetypes and unconscious forces. But they are either merely fictive or psychoanalytically grounded. Until recent decades, political philosophy did not reflect upon those monsters that media and daily news now portray as abusers within the family. Men were silent; women did not have voice as equal citizens; children could not speak out against adults because they were minors.

Political philosophy, then, denied gender-based violence until the emergence of gender studies at the end of the last century. Feminist theorists have in fact started to radicalize criticism against the patriarchal foundation of politics and philosophy, questioning the grounding concept/image of politics, that is, the social contract (Nussbaum, 2009; Pateman, 1988). However, the first male philosophical stream, which showed a critical interest in the analysis of the family and paternal authority, was the Frankfurt School.

In the 1930s, thanks to interdisciplinary research, theorists and social scientists began to study the roots of the authoritarian personality, starting from the distortion of the public–private relationship. Studies on Authority and the Family, published in Paris in 1936 during the exile, is a pivotal study because it shows the interest of male philosophers in investigating the contradictions present in the bourgeois family and the desperation of women and children, deprived of their happiness (Horkheimer, 1936). However, starting from a Marxist and psychosocial perspective, in the essay Authority and the Family, Horkheimer individutes the dialectic ambivalences, which connote paternal authority and the bourgeois family: “But common concerns took a positive form in sexual love and especially in maternal care. The growth and happiness of the other are willed in such unions. A felt opposition therefore arises between them and hostile reality outside. To this extent, the family not only educates for authority in bourgeois society; it also cultivates the dream of a better condition for mankind.” (Horkheimer, 2002: 114). But autonomy is not available to women. Although this analysis was challenging in the years of the affirmation of Nazi totalitarianism, no female scientists took part in the research.

Following the track marked by the critical theory of society (although some paternalistic features have to be further investigated) and gender studies, contemporary political and social philosophy has started to consider private issues as a matter of collective concern. Social justice can be rethought starting from the family (Moller Okin, 1991) because it is not a purely formal, distributive, and procedural process but a question related to the creation/development of human capabilities (Nussbaum, 2011) in respect to others since childhood. The learning process toward moral sentiments and the grammar of justice is genealogically rooted in the family, yet so too is its opposite: misrecognition and abuse.

Toward a new approach to dignity in human rights discourse

Revealing camouflaged and denied allusions to cruel realities, as fancifully manifested in fairy tales, we might be able to understand where a primary “confused” perception that a person has about the violation of his or her psychophysical integrity comes from. It arises from a not yet rationalized feeling of profaned body, desecrated interiority, that is, wholeness and identity in the supposedly protected interiors of the household. This interpretation can integrate—starting from the public realm up to the public sphere and the political domain—the view of human rights as arising from public reasoning.

Reinforcing the capability approach and the notion of development as freedom, in Idea of Justice Sen re-elaborates Rawls’ notion of public reason as a constitutive principle for legitimate democracies. Yet, Sen (2009) does not conceive human rights as a formally definite list of principles and norms but as the result of an incessant public reasoning, juridifying claims of validity coming from the bottom up. Democracy is meant as the exercise of public reason for all citizens, participating in civic debates, developing a “capacity for voice,” and including otherness (Habermas, 2002). Yet, this approach is mainly valid for adults. Therefore, if we interpret the hermeneutics and the contents of reality that fantasy mystifies under camouflaged shapes, we also might be able to give voice to offended children and their violated dignity.

Yet, this point brings out the contestability of a substantial notion like the idea of dignity. In recent human rights discourse, dignity has often been at the core of controversies because it is considered as metaphysic or naturalistic. However, normative authors like Habermas (2010) and Benhabib (2011) have reconsidered this notion, integrating Kantian universalism and Bloch’s (1987) inheritance in the understanding of human rights as a “realistic utopia.” This idea reframes Rawls’ (1999) argument about the necessity to conceive an ideal theory, according to which any society ought to be internally well-ordered and to have at least decent, domestic political institutions.

In the fall of political ideologies, the word “dignity” (Rodotà, 2013) seems to have become a pragmatic idea, able to mobilize millions of people in different parts of the world, renewing language toward the defense of fundamental freedoms. In addition, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) recognizes in article 1 the principle of “human dignity” as “inviolable. It must be respected and protected.”

A counter-factual and normative analysis of fairy tales can also indicate a new understanding of the idea of dignity and the concrete utopia of human rights (Moyn, 2010), which arises often unconsciously as a not-yet-rationalized sentiment in the household as a sense of fear and deprivation, which can be generalized beyond cultural contexts. The affective–emotive dimension of human rights therefore becomes compatible with universalism and cultural pluralism (Ferrara, 2014; Corradetti, 2009, 2014). Consequently, universalism can be conceived as concretely immanent to life experiences but transcending the sphere of factuality. Walzer named this process as “reiterative universalism,” when “liberation is a particular experience, repeated for each oppressed people” (Walzer, 1989: 513).

The sense of deprivation and humiliation rises always from the proximity. As Eleanor Roosevelt, president of the UN Commission which delivered the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, stated, “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world” (Roosevelt, 1958). The sense of violated dignity always originates ex negativo from experiences of misrecognition in contexts of daily lives. However, the threatened child (or a violated adult masked under the guise of an innocent kid) represents ambiguously the sentiment of dignity through the powerful and ambivalent dialectic of fantasy, which, while representing abuses, evokes hope in a different world.

Yet, the paradox of fairy tales remains. If they were traditionally used as an educational transfer geared toward children, although undergroundly referred to abuses in the household, which were neglected until recent decades, what does happen now, when domestic violence has become a matter of public concern, global mobilization, domestic/international legislations, and ad hoc social policies? Considering this new horizon and cultural paradigm, can fairy tales be still innocently narrated? Adults can continue to read them responsibly to children but on the basis of a different socio-political awareness of the phenomenon and a diverse personal consciousness of the consequences of our behaviors.

Violence is like a mirror that reflects a frightening eventuality: each of us can transmute himself or herself into a perpetrator—that is, a monster and a wolf. And this is not merely a matter of pure fantasy.