Let the victims speak, but only late at night. A longitudinal analysis of 129 TV Italian documentaries on past Italian terrorism.

The paper aims to describe how terrorist violence occurred in Italy in a period ranging from 1969 to 1983 has been represented by the documentaries broadcasted by the Italian public television. 129 documentaries, broadcasted by RAI, the Italian public television, from 1971 until now, were analyzed. The analysis showed that only recently (from 2000) documentaries finally allowed victims and their relatives to witness. This change could be seen, according with the socio-emotional model of reconciliation proposed by Shnabel and Nadler (2008), as a way to meet the basic need of empowering of the victims, after their experience of helplessness. However, confronted with the documentaries on Italian terrorism shown before this ‘turn to the victim’ shift, the broadcasting time of more recent documentaries allowing victims to speak changed from prime time to morning or night, making their audience decrease. Moreover, narrative of documentaries hosting the victims became more focused on violent episodes and less devoted to a broader understanding of the entire period. Summing all it up, the recent ‘turn to the victims’ of Italian documentaries could be interpreted in an ambivalent way. On the one hand, it may signal a deeper social elaboration of this past. On the other hand, it could also lead to a kind of dismissal of this difficult historical period (De Luna, 2011), reduced to the private experience of suffering expressed by the victims and their relatives without paying due attention to a more general understanding of this period and of its unresolved historical issues.