Let the victims speak, but only late at night. Ambivalences of the “turn to victim” shift in TV documentaries on the Anni di piombo.

The paper aims to investigate how media narratives of violence may be studied in the frame of intergroup reconciliation processes. According to this new field of research (Nadler & Shnabel, 2008), media narratives, in fact, may be seen as a major help to face both moral responsibilities for past crimes of perpetrators and negative emotions for past helplessness of victims, so driving to an end the social conflict of victimization by which all actors of past violence struggle to be judged as the “true” victims of violence (bar-Tal, 2002), while bystanders try to cover up the importance of their inability to take a clear stance on the violence they witnessed. Proposals for discussion