A retrial in Belgrade has done what the first trial could not: it has held parents accountable for the massacre their son committed. The shooting at Vladislav Ribnikar primary school last year left nine children and a guard dead, a tragedy that shook Serbia to its core. Now, the father has been sentenced to 14 and a half years, the mother to three, for illegal possession of weapons and child neglect. This is not justice as vengeance. It is justice as a mirror held up to a rotting society.
Let us be clear. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where the atomised family has replaced the clan, the village, the church. The father, a radiologist, kept a arsenal of guns in his home, including the one his 13-year-old son used to commit murder. The mother, a biochemist, apparently saw nothing amiss. This is not a failure of parenting. It is a failure of a culture that fetishises firearms, that preaches individual liberty while ignoring the collective responsibility to raise children with discipline and moral purpose.
Compare this to the Victorian Era. A Victorian father would have been flogged in public for such negligence. The state would have taken the children. The family would have been shunned. But we have softened. We have convinced ourselves that the nuclear family is a private fortress, immune from scrutiny. The result is a generation of children raised by screens, by pop culture, by the nihilistic impulses of the internet. The school shooter is not a lone wolf. He is a symptom of a civilisation in decline.
Some will argue that the parents are being scapegoated. That the son alone bears responsibility. This is the pablum of the modern age, where individual agency is both exaggerated and denied. Yes, the boy pulled the trigger. But who filled his head with fantasies of violence? Who left the guns unlocked? Who checked out of the hard work of moral instruction? The parents are not scapegoats. They are accomplices.
The court has done what the intelligentsia refuses to do: it has named the rot. It has said that a family that does not discipline its children is a threat to the republic. It has sent a signal that the state will no longer look the other way when fathers stockpile weapons and mothers scroll through Instagram while their sons descend into darkness.
This verdict is a small step. But it is a step in the right direction. Perhaps other nations, including our own, might take note. For too long we have pretended that the ills of society can be solved by more therapy, more medication, more security guards at school gates. The real solution is simpler and more painful. It begins in the home. It begins with parents who are not friends to their children but guardians of their souls.
The fall of Rome did not happen overnight. It happened when fathers stopped teaching their sons virtue. When mothers valued comfort over character. When the state ceased to hold families accountable. Serbia has taken a stand against this tide. The rest of us would do well to watch and learn.