Italy announced on Tuesday the expansion to Sicily and the region where the city of Naples is located of a program aimed at preventing at-risk children from following in the footsteps of their mobster parents by removing them from their families, the AFP news agency reported. quoted by News .ro.

The program, founded in 2012, aims to break the cycle in which power in mafia clans is passed from generation to generation through blood ties.

“This is a historic moment in the fight against the mafia,” said Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio, who presented the protocol signed by five ministers and the Italian Episcopal Conference.

What is the “Free Choice” program in Italy

The program “Liberi di Scegliere” (“Free Choice”) was founded by children’s judge Roberto Di Bella in Calabria, home to the peninsula’s most powerful criminal organization, the Ndrangheta.

The program will now be extended to the country’s two other major strongholds of organized crime: Sicily, where Cosa Nostra operates, and Campania, a region whose capital is Naples, the “home” of the Camorra.

“At the age of eight, children are taught to shoot. At the age of eight, they sell crack cocaine,” said Chiara Colosimo, president of the parliamentary anti-mafia committee.

Judge Roberto Di Bella said he had seen cases where children were forced to kill their mothers to protect the family’s honor, but he also had to deal with children “who still have a light in their eyes, hoping for another life.”

Some mobsters became prosecution witnesses to protect their children

Since the launch of the program, about 150 children have been placed in foster families or in communities in secret places in Italy, where they discover a life outside the mafia clans. According to Roberto Di Bello, 30 mothers decided to follow their children, and seven of them became collaborators of justice.

Now a judge in Catania, he says he has received letters from jailed mafia leaders thanking him for helping save their children.

“Mafia bosses have also become state collaborators to protect their children, including one who said he was doing it for his grandchildren,” he told AFP.

The letter sent to Roberto Di Bella, seen by AFP, was written by the mafia godfather, who decided to testify for the prosecution.

“I remembered when I was a child, then I imagined my son (…) I made the right choice,” the mobster wrote. “The father is ready to give his life for his son. For my children and for my wife, I thought about changing mine,” he admits.

Italian authorities say the films present a distorted reality of mafia clans

Minister of Family Affairs Eugenia Rochella says that women from mafia clans play an important role in this program. Today’s popular culture and media often portray gangster’s wives as the ones pulling the strings behind the scenes.

“But this is fiction. Any form of emancipation of women is impossible in this culture, which actually rapes and destroys them,” the minister said.

“The role of women is to break the belt of cultural transmission (…) through disobedience,” especially because they are saving themselves and their children from the mafia, Yevgenia Rochella said.