Journal of Forensic Psychology

Abstract

The Jihadi Terrorism Awareness in the Italian Context

Giunta S, Mannino G, La Fiura G and Bernardone A

Islamic terrorism is an extremely complex, articulated and constantly evolving criminal phenomenon: born and rooted in Islamic culture, it has been expanding down to Western world and presents itself in different ways.

Terror is, as we shall see later, the primary object of terrorist groups: that is why we decided to conduct a pilot study with the aim of probing perception of the phenomenon on the part of the subjects.

In this regard, we conducted an innovative and unique study, analysing for the first time the results of 1493 questionnaires that have been administered to a sample of Italian university students, concerning the perception of this growing phenomenon.

The study has confirmed how the strategy of terror, whatever is its nature and its purposes, has a strong impact on lifestyles, on the formation of prejudices, on the general conception of the world; It shifts the coordinates and changes life perspectives.

The study is innovative in terms of perception of the terrorist phenomenon since it appears to be one of the first studies in this area focusing on the Italian context