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The sordid side of student life
05/12/2007 14:27 - (SA)
Rome - Italy is the dream destination of exchange students, but student photos of drunken antics exposed by media coverage of a British girl's murder last month have cast a sobering light on their lifestyle.
After the murder of Meredith Kercher in the university town
of Perugia, where she was on a European Union exchange programme
called Erasmus, the media discovered a trove of material posted
by Perugia students and friends on the web.
Erasmus already had a reputation for cross-border partying
but the photos on the websites Facebook, Youtube and Myspace
cast it in a bad light and even helped to incriminate the
victims' friends, three of whom are now suspects in the case.
That has made some other students with no connection to the
Perugia case think twice about social networking sites.
In the public eye
"The way the Italian media pored over the Perugia suspects'
Facebook and Myspace pages certainly has made me more aware of
how I could be judged," said 24-year-old American student Sam
Cohan, who has lived in Rome for two years.
Drinking and partying by university students is hardly new
but Internet networking sites mean their antics are now in the
public eye for all to see - and judge.
The media have latched on to the trend. A Youtube video of
Finnish schoolboy Pekka-Eric Auvinen showed him brandishing guns
before he shot nine people in November.
In the Perugia case, images and information taken from these
sites has filled the void of verifiable facts. Kercher was
described by friends as "studious and shy" but that did not stop
papers from publishing photos of her with the headline "Flirt".
One suspect, Italian Raffaele Sollecito, posed brandishing a
knife in Halloween pictures found on the Internet and Ivorian
Rudy Hermann Guede, arrested on the run in Germany, was shown
peeling back his eyelids and impersonating a zombie.
'The new Ibiza'
But it is Youtube video and Myspace pictures of American
suspect Amanda Knox, a 20-year-old student, that have drawn most
attention, attracting both fan mail and abusive messages telling
her to "rot in hell". Her Myspace page has since been closed.
Media have used material from the sites to illustrate
speculative stories about students in Perugia, their sex lives
and alleged drug use, including Italy's Corriere della Sera
newspaper which dubbed Perugia "the new Ibiza" after the Spanish
island renowned for its nightlife.
Even before the Perugia murder, foreign students had been
blamed for a new boozing culture among young Italians who until
recently tended to follow Italy's moderate drinking habits
rather than northern European and US "binge-drinking".
Now Italy has a growing problem with alcohol - with
moderate consumption of wine over meals giving way to more
widespread hard drinking.
More than 56 000 Italians are being treated for alcoholism
compared with 19 000 in 1996; drinking among people in their
early 20s has risen 58% in the past seven years.
"Cultural diversity is one thing, but this is not diversity
- it's an invasion," says Paolo Mule, a 25-year-old student
from Rome, who has himself studied abroad but says he "made a
real effort to learn the language and understand the culture".
'We feel justified in being young and drunk'
One possible explanation is that more Italians are going to
university now than before and, like their foreign peers,
experimenting with their new-found freedom.
"As an American, I understand that I come from a completely
different drinking culture," said Cohan. "Advertising and films
almost encourage American college students to binge-drink - we
feel justified in being young and drunk.
"But where 'imported drinking culture' is concerned, the
problem doesn't just lie with Americans," he said.
Erasmus students do not help their own image, forming groups
on websites with titles like "I'm not an alcoholic, I'm just an
Erasmus student".
Natalie Pela, a student from Bristol University in Britain
who is studying in Verona, believes the generalisation is unfair
on many of the 15 000 Erasmus students coming to Italy each year
- one-tenth of the whole programme in 31 countries.
"Italians assume the drinking craze is our fault," she said.
"It's important to remember that for many who are alone and away
from home, drinking creates easy opportunities to make friends.
It's possible to integrate into the local culture as well."
For some Italians, that is still a headache. In the Rome
quarters of Trastevere and Campo dei Fiori, residents' groups
are battling to stop the spread of late-night bars offering
cheap drinks to lure in foreign students.
- Reuters
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