The Support to the Unaccompanied Foreign Minors in Italy between Law's Logic and Gift's Ethics

The Welfare State, through the tax system, distributes resources in the name of solidarity between the members of society. This solidarity should be broader than that of the primary networks, and more equitable than the private charitable network. However, over time, the state has often relied on volunteer networks. This produces new conflicts between "competent" professionals and volunteers, and within the self-perception of the voluntary (Godbout 1992). Godbout, in the wake of Polanyi (1944) and Titmuss (1970), critically studies the various mixed forms of collaboration between ethics of gift and state solidarity.

The coexistence of the two models (that of professional work paid and voluntary work) is not easy, since the spirit of giving contradicts the principle of state equality. Furthermore, it risks transforming someone's free act into simple unpaid work, modifying it thus the deepest meaning and carrying out a social deconstruction of it.

This research will analyze the figure of the voluntary guardian for unaccompanied foreign minors, formalized in Italy by Law 47/2017, to understand the main effects of this new frontier in the relationship between public welfare and voluntary commitment.

The investigation will be conducted with both quantitative and qualitative tools. In the first phase, the data collected from institutional sites (Ministry of the Interior, Juvenile Courts, etc.), will allow us to reconstruct the identity profile of the voluntary guardian (gender, age, qualification and profession). We will then move on to delve deeper into some of specific aspects relating to the experience of volunteer tutoring through the administration of semi-structured interviews with privileged witnesses. We identified them according to the method snowball sampling (Salganik, Heckathorn 2004), with the collaboration of the operators of the Don Calabria Foundation, which organizes and coordinates the activities of the guardians for unaccompanied minors in Calabria.