THE EVIL NEARBY, Beatrice Maria Merolla

Violence, proximity, and the fallacy of the stranger in the contemporary perception of danger

Abstract: There is always a gap between the social perception of danger and the empirical reality revealed by contemporary crime reporting. In a culture that instinctively associates threat with the stranger, the concrete experience of violence shows instead that the gravest risk often lies within relationships of proximity, in affective, familial, and trust-based bonds. Through a narrative and reflective register, this essay challenges the reassuring myth of the “external monster” and shows how evil often appears under the forms of normality, intimacy, and familiarity. From this perspective, recent cases of femicide and intra-family violence are read not as traumatic exceptions, but as manifestations of a recurring structure that compels us to rethink the relationship between trust, the visibility of risk, and the recognition of warning signs. What follows is a critique of the simplified narrative that treats the unknown as the primary source of threat, and, at the same time, an invitation to reconsider the categories through which fear is socially constructed.

Keywords: #genderviolence #crimereporting #riskperception #proximity #toxicrelationships #femicide #familyviolence #trust #normality #BeatriceMariaMerolla #ethicasocietas #ethicasocietasjournal #scientificjournal #humanities #socialsciences #ethicasocietasupli

versione italiana

Beatrice Maria Merolla covers crime reporting and hosts Incidente Probatorio (Channel 122), but her work goes far beyond simply reconstructing the facts. Her focus is on what remains: the details that do not add up, the silences, the questions that continue to search for answers. She writes to move beyond the news itself and to stay within each story for as long as it takes to truly understand it.. LinkedIn Profile

The Changing Gaze and the Face of the Stranger

There is a precise moment, in the heart of a crowded station, in the chaos of an airport, or in a packed square, when something shifts. It is not the noise of the trains, nor the constant flow of people. It is the gaze. It becomes more attentive, more selective, almost radar-like. One begins to observe those passing nearby and, often without full awareness, a simple question emerges: could this person hurt me? In this reaction lies one of the oldest structures of human fear, the one that links danger to the unknown and to the stranger.

The fear of the stranger has an immediate force because it seems to offer a simple geography of risk. The unknown other, the face encountered by chance, the unfamiliar body moving through the crowd becomes the perfect container for our anxieties. The stranger appears threatening precisely because he or she cannot be controlled, and this lack of knowledge easily turns into suspicion. It is an understandable anthropological dynamic, but for that very reason also a deeply deceptive one, because it trains us to look for evil far from ourselves and to place it outside the space of familiarity.

Evil in Proximity

Crime reporting, by contrast, stubbornly reveals a far more uncomfortable truth. Anyone who observes it consistently eventually recognizes a recurring fact: evil rarely erupts from the outside in anonymous form. In most cases, it emerges and develops within already existing relationships, inside spaces of trust, proximity, and shared everyday life. It almost never arrives in the face of someone encountered by chance; far more often, it has a known name, a familiar voice, a presence already admitted into the sphere of intimacy.

The events that have most deeply marked Italian public debate in recent years show this with particular clarity. The femicide of Giulia Cecchettin shocked the country not only because of its brutality, but because of its relational structure: she was not killed by a stranger, but by her former boyfriend, that is, by someone who knew her movements, her habits, and her vulnerabilities. In the same way, the death of Giulia Tramontano, killed by her partner while pregnant, showed how the place of greatest exposure to danger may coincide with the home, with a stable relationship, with the very horizon of cohabitation. The case of Saman Abbas, although situated in a different cultural and familial context, reproduced the same structure: the threat did not come from outside, but from within the relational nucleus that should have protected her.

The Deceptive Face of Normality

These stories cannot be dismissed as anomalies or exceptional deviations. On the contrary, they reveal the recurrence of a pattern that runs through many forms of contemporary violence. And it is precisely here that one of the most reassuring narratives of modernity begins to crack: the idea that evil is recognizable because it is distant, visible because it is external, avoidable because it is separate from our everyday worlds. The myth of the “monster” functions in exactly this way. It constructs an exceptional, deviant, almost theatrical figure, allowing us to keep believing that danger can be identified in advance and, once recognized, kept at a distance.

Reality is far less consoling. The evil that is hardest to recognize is the one that moves within proximity, grows in ordinary relationships, feeds on trust, and exploits the symbolic capital of familiarity itself. It does not need extraordinary masks, because it already wears the most effective one of all: normality. It may have the face of the caring partner, the ever-present relative, the person who until the day before belonged seamlessly to the emotional and domestic routine. And it is precisely this apparent adherence to normality that makes violence so difficult to foresee and, often, even to name.

The Invisible Face of Evil

What makes this truth so difficult to accept is its profoundly destabilizing character. To acknowledge that danger may lurk in places perceived as safest means to undermine the very idea of affective protection as a naturally innocent space. It means admitting that it is not enough to distrust the unknown, cross the street, or watch the stranger in order to protect oneself from harm. Real danger, the deepest and most devastating kind, often lies precisely where our threshold of vigilance is lowest: in intimate relationships, in family bonds, in ties of trust.

This does not mean that one should live in a permanent state of suspicion, nor that every close relationship should be interpreted as a potential threat. The point is not to replace trust with paranoia. The point is to abandon an excessively convenient representation of violence, the one that places it always elsewhere and always outside ourselves. As long as evil continues to be imagined as radically external, it will remain more difficult to recognize its ordinary, everyday, and relational forms.

Changing Perspective

From this point of view, the question we ask must radically change. It is no longer a matter of asking which of the strangers we encounter might harm us. The issue is far more complex and far less reassuring: how capable are we, really, of seeing those who stand beside us? How well can we read the signs of manipulation, control, devaluation, dependency, and violence growing beneath the language of normality? And how much does our need for reassurance lead us, instead, to remove those signs precisely because they are too close, too familiar, too deeply intertwined with the bonds that shape our lives?

The invisible face of evil does not coincide with the absence of traces, but with our difficulty in interpreting them. Violence often does not erupt suddenly as an absolute event; rather, it takes shape through small gestures, repeated words, dynamics of possession, devaluation, and isolation that remain invisible for a long time precisely because they are embedded in the continuity of daily life. When violence finally reveals itself in irreversible form, its extreme character tends to obscure everything that came before it. And yet it is precisely in that grey zone, made of unrecognized or underestimated signs, that much of the possibility of prevention is at stake.

From this perspective, crime reporting should not simply record the final event, but should contribute to a deeper re-education of the social gaze. Its task is not only to recount the fact, but to challenge the categories through which society thinks about danger. As long as we continue to believe that danger almost always wears the face of the stranger, we will remain culturally disarmed before the most widespread forms of real violence.

Conclusions

Perhaps the hardest point to accept is precisely this: what frightens us most is not the unknown as such, but the possibility that evil is not elsewhere, but already beside us. Proximity, which ought to reassure, can become the place where danger is rendered less visible and therefore more effective. For this reason, the real challenge does not lie only in protecting ourselves from what is outside, but in building cultural, relational, and social tools capable of recognizing violence where it most easily hides: within normality, within trust, within bonds.