Minors, Italy is not a country for children: less and less and more and more poor. And social spending and education spending are falling

There is an Italy forbidden to minors. Because if in the last ten years the number of children and adolescents in absolute poverty has tripled (today they are beyond 1.2 million), this is also reflected in the difficult ones housing conditions in which many of them are forced. In a country where about 2 million apartments remain vacant and unused, in the years of the crisis 14% of the minors faced serious hardship on this front. And while investments are being reduced in social expenditure for children and for education, children and adolescents are forced into unsafe schools: more than 7 thousand are old and more than 21 thousand do not have the certificate of viability. In spite of this, more and more boys and girls are busy to concretely assert their rights.

These are some of the data highlighted by the X Atlas of children at risk of Save the Children, published by Giulio Cederna and entitled ‘The children's time’. The text, which takes stock of the last ten years, is presented this year simultaneously in ten Italian cities, on the occasion of the new edition of the ‘Let's light up the future’ campaign to combat educational poverty. The petition asks for the recovery of public spaces today abandoned in a state of degradation to be allocated for free extracurricular activities for children and safe schools for all. The mobilization is associated with 16 symbolic places forbidden to minors in Italy. "In the last decade, along with intergenerational inequalities, geographic, social, economic inequalities have grown between children from the South, the Center and the North, between children from central areas and suburbs, between Italians and foreigners, from school children good and of the ghetto classes ”explains Valerio Neri, general manager of Save the Children.

EDUCATIONAL POVERTY – In the last ten years, the percentage of children living in Italy in conditions of absolute poverty rose from 3.7% in 2008 to 12.5% ​​in 2018. A negative record among European countries that saw a deterioration in the toughest years of the economic crisis, between 2011 and 2014, when the rate went from 5% at 10%. In absolute terms, in 2008 the minors in this condition were about 375 thousand, in 2014 they already touched 1.2 million. Today there are 1.26 million (563 thousand in the south, 508 thousand in the north and 192 thousand in the Center). In 2018, 453,000 children under the age of 15 benefited from food parcels.

DENATALITY AND NEW ITALIANS – The crisis has also had an impact on the increase in birth rates. In 2008, in Italy minors represented 17.1% of the resident population, while in 2018 they were reduced to 16.2%. A phenomenon concentrated in particular in the South and on the islands and only partially offset by the growth in the number of children e boys of foreign origin: in 2008 there were just over 700 thousand and ten years later there are over one million. Today, more than one minor resident in 10 in Italy has foreign citizenship. "To them – comments Save the Children – an obsolete law and one of the most restrictive in Europe, it continues to recognize the citizenship and the full recognition of civil rights only when they turn 18 years of age ".

MISS OUT INVESTMENTS – Yet Italy still does not have a strategic plan for children with adequate investments and remains one of the European countries that invests less in childhood, with gaps between the different regions in real access to services for children and their families . Suffice it to say that in the face of an average annual social expenditure for the family area and less than 172 euros per capita for interventions by the municipalities, the Calabria stands at 26 euros and theEmilia Romagna to 316. According to OECD data, Italy spends about 3.6% of GDP on education and university, almost a point and a half less than the average of OECD countries, equal to 5%. The spending review of 2008 "has robbed school and university 8 billion euros in 3 years, with linear cuts and only minimally compensated with subsequent interventions". Expenditure on education has fallen from 4.6% of GDP in 2009 to 4.1% in 2011 to the historical minimum of 3.6% in 2016 (latest OECD data available).

Time lost on the front of school policies is mirrored every year in hundreds of thousands of children lost at school (the so-called Early school leavers), on which Italy – despite having made significant steps forward – lags behind, currently standing at a 14.5%, with a slight increase since 2017. A figure that hides strong inequalities, with regions that have already hit theEuropean goal (Trento, Umbria, Abruzzo and Friuli Venezia Giulia) and regions where the dispersion rate exceeds the 20% ceiling (Calabria, Sicily and Sardinia).

LITTLE SECURE SCHOOLS – The lack of investment is reflected in the conditions of school facilities. In Italy of earthquakes and hydrogeological instability, out of a total of 40,151 buildings surveyed by the school building registry, 7,000 are classified as 'old', about 22,000 were built before the 1970s and the rules that introduced the obligation of static testing (there are 15,550 are free) and an even greater number before 1974, the year of entry into force of the anti-seismic regulations. There are 21,662 institutes that do not have a certificate of viability and 24,000 without a fire prevention certificate. In areas of high and medium-high seismic hazard, there are 13,714 school buildings that were not designed to withstand an earthquake and only one in five schools is earthquake-proof.

PLACES TO RETURN – While the global debate turns on the impact of climate change on the planet, Italian children and adolescents are growing up in a country where there is less and less green, with an increase of 30 thousand hectares of cemented land from 2012 to 2018. 37% of minors is concentrated in 14 large metropolitan areas, in environments not really suitable for children. Also for this Save the Children, on the occasion of its ‘Let’s light the future’ campaign wanted to re-launch a petition for recover abandoned spaces. Last year, among those reported, there were two symbolic places: L'Aquila, that ten years after the earthquake still sees children and young people deprived of the possibility of returning to study in their schools and of the educational and recreational spaces they need and the Parliament, “the place where all too often children's rights are ignored and their voice remains unheard ”.

In 2019 the former colony of Montesilvano, in Abruzzo, symbol of all those spaces that had once been dedicated to children and that have now been abandoned or converted to luxury tourist activities or Villa Beer, to Ancona, which before the last earthquake in central Italy housed a library and a playroom for children and which, following the damage caused by the earthquake, has not been reopened. And still thereSalvemini school in the Barra district of Naples, now an abandoned skeleton in a territory already strongly deprived of school facilities and spaces dedicated to children. The organization has also included the Rogoredo grove, in Milan, which went to the news to be a place where so many children, often minors, go to look for heroin and lose themselves.

The petition Let's light up the future

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