Maurice Berger is a child psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, former associate professor of child psychology. He works in a Reinforced Educational Center and teaches at the National School of Magistracy. He has published
On gratuitous violence in France.
Adolescents, hyperviolent, testimonies and analyzes
(L'Artilleur, 2019) and
Facing violence in France, The Berger report
(L'Artilleur, 2021).
LE FIGARO. - Friday, September 9, a 17-year-old pupil, educated at the Truffaut high school in Beauvais, suffered serious abuse committed by a gang of young people. Seriously injured, he is still hospitalized. An investigation was opened, the track of the rivalry between schools of Méru and Beauvais being mentioned. How to analyze this incident?
Maurice Berger. -
The daily frequency of clashes between young people from different neighborhoods shows that we are no longer faced with a news item but faced with a functioning that affects certain groups and leaves us helpless.
We would like to designate a single origin for these clashes with extremely serious consequences, but that would be inaccurate, because the causes are multiple.
A violent group is organized around a negative and cruel leader who attracts and keeps under his influence impressionable teenagers who have difficulty thinking for themselves.
You just have to reread the book
His Majesty of the Flies
to understand it.
This type of group provides its members with a sense of identity based on boundaries (a territory, a culture, an ethnic group, etc.).
But such a heterogeneous group, which is not united by positive values, can only be defined in relation to the supposed "enemies" which we will find that it needs.
It is interesting to consider the question of territory from an unusual angle, but which once again raises the question of education from early childhood.
We have specific works that we avoid citing in France for fear that they will be interpreted as a biological determinism of violence, whereas they are used without problem abroad.
These works show that the child has “three” brains which articulate, or not, their functioning between them, starting from the quality of the environment in which he lives.
The reptilian brain located in the brainstem and the cerebellum, common to all vertebrates, triggers instinctive survival behaviors and in particular controls the territorial instinct and the attack and flight reflexes.
Just think of the behavior of some dogs when you pass near their territory.
The mammalian brain, called the emotional brain, limbic system located in the center of the brain, is present in mammals.
It triggers strong emotions (anger, fear of abandonment) normally slowed down by the third brain, but it also participates in the development of empathy which allows maternal instinct.
And it is from the way in which parents share and calm the emotions of small children that the child's capacity for empathy, his sociability, his curiosity about what is new, different from self, others.
This brain thus helps to control the reptilian brain.
Finally the cognitive brain, the frontal lobes, has an impact on reasoning, kindness,
creativity.
It enables the finest achievements of the human species, but when cut off from the emotions of the mammalian brain, it can lead to appalling cruelty.
The main shared values are the defense of the territory and solidarity in the fight, which is necessary because it helps the cohesion of the group and the feeling of owning a territory in the absence of being able to think together.
Maurice Berger
This is how we all have an "animal" territorial instinct, that is to say the need, for our physical and psychological security, of a protected territory, from "home, sweet home" to borders. of our country, through a movement of annoyance if a foreigner enters our land.
But for this instinct to take on a civilized form, there must be an environment throughout childhood which gives the subject a feeling of internal security which leads him to consider that what is foreign is not necessarily threatening, and that it may even be interesting to know.
On the contrary, the young people who participate in territorial violence have often been raised in a family group with a clan functioning, where everyone must think the same, educational violence is often present,
and violence in itself is a source of pride, valued as a form of belonging, instead of respect for taboos and collective rules being a shared value.
The clan is a psychic territory.
The subject does not have his own identity, but a group, family, ethnic, geographical identity, which alters the possibility of developing relational capacities with people outside the group.
Many young people transpose this group identity into the neighbourhood, where they almost always walk around in an undifferentiated group:
but a group, family, ethnic, geographical identity, which alters the possibility of developing relational capacities with people outside the group.
Many young people transpose this group identity into the neighbourhood, where they almost always walk around in an undifferentiated group:
but a group, family, ethnic, geographical identity, which alters the possibility of developing relational capacities with people outside the group.
Many young people transpose this group identity into the neighbourhood, where they almost always walk around in an undifferentiated group:
“I come from such a city, and I belong to this band of friends”
.
The brawl strengthens these bonds, for example by coming to the aid of the other during the fight.
The main shared values are the defense of the territory and solidarity in the fight, which is necessary because it helps the cohesion of the group and the feeling of owning a territory in the absence of being able to think together.
To this is sometimes added a culture of the hereditary enemy, the dams reproached to the other group can go back several generations, like the antagonisms between the supporters of certain football clubs, but in more deadly.
However, the "work of civilization" also consists in limiting the transmission of individual or collective traumas suffered, that is to say in not transmitting beyond a generation, its children, resentment or hatred in relation to damages suffered, without hiding them.
Is it just a simple news item or does it illustrate an evolution of society?
These facts show that the aggressors have understood that they do not fear much.
When the victims I treat inform me of the court judgments, I see that the level of sentences has dropped as much as the level of the baccalaureate, and a judge who applied the Penal Code more would be completely out of step with his colleagues and risk being be disavowed by the Court of Appeal.
Recently, in a more individual attack, four young people from a "sensitive" neighborhood who inflicted on a quiet angler multiple fractures of the facial bone and a fracture of the orbital floor, were sentenced to three months of suspended prison sentence.
When the justice of a country takes insufficient account of the bodies of the victims,
why ask authors to think differently?
It is sometimes necessary to reach the level of attempted homicide for a sentence to become significant, but the stops that often could have been put in place previously have not been achieved.
There is a dehumanization of the victims in the sense that those who attack do not perceive themselves as persons but only as members of a group.
Maurice Berger
It also shows the paralysis of successive governments in the face of growing barbarism in the country.
They are only interested in it when constrained by its magnitude.
Rivalries between rival gangs from neighborhoods and neighboring towns are not new. But has this phenomenon increased in recent years?
The numbers speak for themselves with a 24% increase in gang brawls between 2019 and 2020.
The images broadcast on social networks show an incredible violence perpetrated against this young person. How to explain that some young people are not even able to recognize the emotions of others?
There is a dehumanization of the victims in the sense that those who attack do not perceive themselves as persons but only as members of a group.
We know that empathy has two dimensions.
Proximal, with regard to people who are like oneself, familiar;
and peripheral, with regard to others, which means that one can feel them as not totally “strangers”, perceive resemblances with them, identify with what they feel.
In the struggles between territories, there is no longer empathy, but only questions of group honor fueled by social networks, wild instincts of territory, and the pleasure of waging war without applying the equivalent of the Geneva Convention.
The adversary is dehumanized, this