“To be hated breeds hatred.”

Johan Leman, 2 September 2026

“L’essere odiati fa odiare.”
(P.P. Pasolini, 16 June 1968)

Put more generally: Being hated oneself, or feeling that one is the object of hatred (social, familial or otherwise), makes people hate in turn. Pier Paolo Pasolini once wrote this.

I am reminded of this when I think about the difficult relationship that some young people (without generalising!) have with the police and with “uniforms” more generally. Some young people, rightly or wrongly, feel that they are constantly being singled out, so to speak, hated, and they in turn start targeting and hating those whom they suspect of hating them.

Am I seeking to condone their behaviour? Do I want to coddle them? Do I want to place the blame on “us”? Am I claiming that there aren’t young people who simply have no scruples? No, absolutely not. But I do think it can be worthwhile to try to understand and turn around this feeling of mutual frustration (and sometimes hatred) that sometimes exists.

Pasolini was, incidentally, writing in a completely different context: he was observing that young people from poor backgrounds who became police officers were seen as traitors by their former friends and by the neighbourhoods they came from.

For some time now, one of the important priorities of Foyer’s work has been to try to improve relations between the police and young people. The approach has already been tested to some extent, including through the use of the MigratieMuseumMigration, and the results have been quite encouraging. The senior leadership of the police force serving the area of which Molenbeek is part is, incidentally, very open to the idea.

One of the first steps we are taking at Foyer at the beginning of the new working year is to organise a “mixed relay” involving police officers and young people on Saturday, 12 September, at 1:30 p.m. In the heart of Molenbeek, we want to show that young people and the police can perfectly well take part in sport together and help one another in the process — and do so in places that are particularly sensitive in symbolic terms.

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