Victims of Racket: Entrepreneurs and Traders Dealing with Cosa Nostra, Ndrangheta, and Camorra

This work proposes research on a still unexplored psychical world: thoughts, emotions, and real events experienced by racket victims of the three largest criminal organizations of the South of Italy: Mafia, Camorra, and Ndrangheta. The purpose is to understand the multifaceted psycho-anthropological and social issues criminal organizations have settled on, and particularly which psycho-relational dynamics and sociocultural codes come into play in the complex and controversial relationship between victim and criminal system, between victim and support systems. With entrepreneurs and tradesmen victims of organized crime, we have analyzed lived experiences - in particular fear - and psychological problems they had to cope with; events and motivations that allowed them "breaking" the silence and asking for help; the representation of a support network before and after their possible pressing charges; the kind of help offered by support systems. Dignity and self-respect, the fight for one's own freedom and honor, deep values of southern cultures, those same values the various Mafias use and radicalize, turning them upside down and transforming them into suppression and domination tools, seem to be the main themes leading the rebellion to victimization. Together with this are the strong supports of anti-racket association networks.