The news arrives from Belgrade: a mother and father sentenced to prison for their son’s school shooting. A tragedy, yes, but the response from Westminster is telling. UK officials have commended the “tough European judicial stance,” as if this were a triumph of law rather than a symptom of a society in decay. Let us pause and examine this through the lens of history, not hysteria.
The Serbian case is straightforward enough. A thirteen-year-old boy, armed with his father’s gun, killed nine classmates and a guard last year. Now his parents face fourteen and fifteen years behind bars, charged with child neglect and illegal weapons possession. The court made it clear: they failed in their duty. The boy himself, being too young for criminal responsibility, is in a psychiatric institution. So the parents pay the price.
And what does Britain say? The usual claptrap about ‘robust judicial responses’ and ‘lessons to be learned.’ But I wonder: is this truly about justice, or is it about the theatre of accountability? In the Victorian era, we understood that a parent’s role was sacred, but also that the state could not replace it. Today, we imprison mothers and fathers as a gesture, a signal that we take things seriously. Yet the root causes fester: a culture of violent imagery, the atomisation of the family, the abdication of moral education to screens and schools.
Consider the historical parallels. When the Roman Republic declined, parents were increasingly held accountable for their children’s crimes, not because of a robust legal framework, but because the old bonds of authority had frayed. The paterfamilias once commanded absolute respect. When that eroded, the state stepped in, harshly and often arbitrarily. We are seeing the same pattern: as traditional discipline vanishes, the courts become the new disciplinarians. But the rod of the state is a poor substitute for the moral backbone of the home.
There is also the matter of national identity. Serbia is a small, proud nation, still haunted by its own history of violence. To punish parents so severely is to admit that the state mistrusts its own people. Britain, in applauding, reveals its own anxiety. We have had our horrors: Dunblane, Hungerford. Our response was to ban handguns, to tighten licensing. But we did not jail the parents. Why? Because we still, just about, believe in the distinction between individual guilt and collective failure. Serbia has blurred that line, and we cheer from the sidelines, perhaps hoping that such severity will not be demanded of us.
The truth is that no sentence can resurrect the dead. And no amount of judicial posturing will mend the broken trust between a society and its youth. We are living through a period of intellectual decadence, where we mistake punishment for prevention, and legalism for morality. The Serbian parents are not monsters; they are figures in a tragedy of modern life. Their imprisonment may satisfy a thirst for retribution, but it will not stop the next lost boy from finding a gun.
What would a wiser response look like? In the Victorian era, we might have focused on the moral improvement of the family, on community oversight, on the inculcation of responsibility. Today, we leap to the prison cell because it is easier. It makes for good headlines. It allows politicians to nod sagely and say, ‘Look, we are doing something.’
But I see this as a sign of civilisational fatigue. We no longer know how to raise children, so we punish parents. We no longer trust families, so we empower courts. And when the system fails, as it inevitably will, we will double down, demanding even harsher penalties, even more control.
The Serbians are a warning, not a model. And the British applause is the sound of a nation that has lost its nerve. It is easy to applaud when the gallows are in someone else’s yard. Harder to look in the mirror and ask: what have we become?
