When violence becomes a system: complex grief, surviving minors, and community responsibility
Abstract: The femicide of Federica Torzullo, followed by the suicide of the perpetrator’s parents, represents an extreme fracture that transcends the boundaries of crime reporting and calls the collective conscience into question. It is not a sequence of isolated events, but a chain of death that destroys bonds, identities, and generational continuity, leaving at its center a minor exposed to complex traumatic grief. By analyzing this tragedy on multiple levels—social, psychological, and symbolic—the article highlights, on the one hand, the risk of collective desensitization and the media-driven spectacle of pain in contemporary society, where violence becomes content and the victim loses her irreducible singularity; on the other hand, it draws on deep interpretive frameworks—Jungian Shadow, transgenerational trauma, and “genealogical void”—to show how violence emerges from the interplay between individual fragility and cultural context. Particular attention is devoted to the impact on the surviving minor, exposed to complex traumatic grief and the simultaneous collapse of primary reference figures. The reflection concludes by invoking the notion of “task” as a human response to trauma, emphasizing the role of adults and the community in rebuilding protection, stability, and future, so that tragedy does not become destiny.
Keywords: #FedericaTorzullo #FedericaTorzulloFemicide #ParentsSuicide #ParentsOfFemicidePerpetratorSuicide #Femicide #GenderViolence #Trauma #TraumaticGrief #MultipleLoss #Minors #Empathy #CollectiveDesensitization #Spectacularization #SocialResponsibility #Psychology #Sociology #Ethics #Jung #Shadow #Patriarchy #Frankl #Resilience #Community #Care #FrancescaZaza #ethicasocietas #ethicasocietasjournal #scientificjournal #humansciences #socialsciences #ethicasocietasupli
Is it possible for the tragedy of femicide to be cast in an even darker shade?
The answer is, tragically, yes. We did not think it possible to add further horror to the story of Federica Torzullo, killed by the husband from whom she was separating—and yet it happened: the perpetrator’s parents, overwhelmed by shame and pain, took their own lives, hanging themselves in the garden of their home.
The heights of atrocity seem to rise beyond all imagination, as if the sky itself were weeping tears of human misery. It is in our fragility—in our inability to recognize and contain the darkest parts of ourselves—that human beings come to kill without grasping the devastating scope of their actions.
And what has happened should also question us: how accustomed have we become to the pain of others without it truly touching us? How much have we grown desensitized to the spectacle of tragic events that would instead deserve silence, respect, and depth?
Femicide does not kill only a woman: it annihilates what that woman represented, shatters bonds, identities, stories. And those who remain—those who survive such a ferocious chain of death—carry a burden that no human being should have to bear.
Who will take care, today, of Federica’s son, who in the space of just a few days has lost his murdered mother, his father who committed the killing, and his grandparents who died by suicide, crushed by shame?
News and society: when pain becomes consumption
In its starkness, this story is not merely a news item: it is a mirror reflecting deep social and psychological dynamics. Contemporary society lives immersed in a constant flow of violent images and narratives that risk anesthetizing our capacity for empathy.
Sociology speaks of collective desensitization: a process whereby continuous exposure to others’ suffering reduces emotional responsiveness, turning pain into content to be consumed rather than an experience to be understood.
In this context, tragedy becomes spectacle, the victim a symbol, complexity a dispensable detail. And yet, events like this should restore our sense of limits, reminding us that violence is never an isolated fact, but the product of a cultural terrain that makes it possible.
Individual and collective shadows: a trauma that crosses time
To fully grasp the depth of this story, we must shift our gaze from news reporting to the psychic and cultural dynamics that sustain it. Carl Gustav Jung spoke of the Shadow: the set of denied, repressed, unintegrated aspects of the psyche. When the Shadow is not recognized, it finds a breach through which it can emerge in violent and uncontrollable forms.
The act of Federica’s husband cannot be reduced to an isolated gesture: it is the eruption of an individual Shadow within a cultural ground that still struggles to dissolve patriarchal residues, models of possession, and identity fragilities disguised as authority.
But the tragedy does not end with the violent act. It continues, it spreads, it becomes trauma for those who remain. At the center of this trauma is a ten-year-old child. At that age, death is already conceived as irreversible, but it is incomprehensible when it takes the form of the simultaneous collapse of all primary figures.
Losing one’s mother through violence is an enormous rupture; discovering that one’s father is the perpetrator is an unbearable emotional paradox; witnessing the disappearance of grandparents, swallowed by pain, destroys any remaining sense of continuity and protection.
Developmental psychology defines this as complex traumatic grief: a loss that cannot be processed without a stable emotional container. But in this case, that container no longer exists. The risks include irrational guilt (“I could have prevented it”), shame, emotional regression, hypervigilance, and internal fragmentation.
Alongside this perspective stands another, less clinical but symbolically powerful reading: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s metagenealogy. According to this approach, each individual is born into a genealogical tree that is not only biological, but also psychological and symbolic—an intertwining of memories, roles, secrets, and transgenerational wounds.
In this case, that tree is not merely damaged: it has been broken. Jodorowsky speaks of a “genealogical void”—an absence that concerns not only the people lost, but the very function of rootedness. The child has not only lost his loved ones; he has lost the continuity of his own story.
Care, therefore, cannot be limited to containing trauma; it must rebuild belonging, creating a new affective ground in which secure roots can grow.
Giving form to pain: adult responsibility and ethical task
There is a point where psychology meets ethics—and it is here that Viktor Frankl’s voice becomes crucial. Frankl argued that meaning does not reside in the traumatic event itself, but in the response we choose to give. Pain has no meaning in itself, but it can generate a task: to safeguard life, protect what remains, and prevent horror from becoming destiny.
Today, this task falls to the adults who remain around the child. It is an immense responsibility, encompassing at least two duties: surviving their own suffering and becoming support for him.
Adults must create a stable and predictable environment, where everyday life—routines, small gestures, constant presences—becomes the first building block of reconstruction.
Truth must be told with measure: without details that wound, but without omissions that create ghosts. The child must be protected from guilt and shame—two powerful shadows that readily take root in contexts of family trauma.
At the same time, adults cannot (and must not) present themselves as invulnerable: the child needs to see that pain exists, but can be crossed without destroying oneself.
There is also a further duty: to protect him from media exposure. News coverage can turn him into a symbol, and the repeated display of his pain risks reopening the wound again and again. Protecting him does not mean denying what happened, but preventing it from becoming a case, a headline, an image.
The long road: from mourning to shared responsibility
The road is long for adults as well. They must confront multiple losses that strike at bonds, identities, and trust in the world. To avoid breaking, they need support, spaces for listening, and rites of farewell that give form to pain.
But above all, they need direction. Frankl would say they can find it by transforming tragedy into a task: protecting the child, safeguarding his growth, and preventing violence from defining his future.
In this sense, an impossible mourning can become a place of shared responsibility—not to find meaning in death, but to build meaning in the life that continues.
Because, in the end, what remains in the hands of adults is not only a wounded child, but the possibility that this story will not repeat itself.
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