Civismo e cultura della legalità

[Autom. eng. transl.] The data show an articulated picture of the relationship between young people, civic sense and culture of legality. The majority of young people think that laws are tools that make society work (86.8%), that guarantee the protection of individual freedoms (79.1%), and that serve to punish those who make mistakes (78.5% ). However, there is no shortage of critical notes: 48.3% are convinced that they serve to protect mostly the elites, 30.3% also consider them an instrument of oppression of individual freedom. More concretely, a certain lability of knowledge and therefore of the perception of the boundaries between what is legal and what is not is confirmed, often confused with what is morally lawful for the community or for the young people themselves. The perception that young people have of the high degree of illegality widespread in Italian society is worrying. Only 49.7% think that the majority of people respect the laws. Although one in three young people (29.4%) feel a sense of powerlessness in the face of the continuing culture of illegality, the great majority (88.5%) do not completely lose hope and think that more needs to be done to change the what's this. The sense of urgency also transpires from the way in which young people massively accept and with few distinctions all the proposals to contrast illegality: from investing in education, to certainty of punishment, from increasing vigilance, to increased penalties to rehabilitation in prisons. In the face of positive and qualifying aspects, there are therefore some basic critical issues that, if underestimated or ignored, can in the long run undermine the development of that civic spirit among young people, which is essential for the coexistence and construction of today's society and tomorrow.