The Serbian court has done what no British judge would dare: it jailed the parents of a mass shooter. The mother and father of the 13-year-old who killed nine at his Belgrade school in 2023 received 14.5 years and 13 years respectively. The verdict is a blunt instrument of collective responsibility. It is also a mirror held up to our own decaying justice system, where the cult of the child as a sovereign being has replaced adult accountability. British child safety experts, predictably, have seized upon the case to demand a global overhaul of parental liability laws. This is the same cast of professional moralists who believe every playground scrap is a potential act of terror and every teenager’s mood swing a sign of radicalisation.
Let us not mince words. The Serbian ruling is not a model of enlightened jurisprudence. It is a throwback to the concept of clan guilt, where the sins of the son are visited upon the father. In the West, we have spent decades dismantling such archaic notions in favour of individual culpability. Yet we now face a paradox. When a child commits atrocity, we either pathologise him as a victim of mental illness or blame the wider society. The parents are rarely prosecuted, for to do so would be to admit that family structure, discipline and moral instruction matter. Better to fund another anti-bullying workshop.
The British experts are not wrong that global reform is needed. But the reform they propose more state intrusion, more surveillance, more therapy will only deepen the problem. The real issue is the collapse of the nuclear family as a unit of moral transmission. In the 19th century, a child who shot his schoolmates would have been viewed as a product of poor upbringing, and the parents would have been shamed into exile. Today, they would be offered counselling and the school would install metal detectors.
The Serbian example is a warning. If we continue to treat children as autonomous agents free from parental responsibility, we will see more shootings. But if we flip to draconian punishment of parents, we risk turning every household into a potential crime scene. The answer is not in the criminal courts but in a cultural revolution. We must restore the idea that parents are not just providers of Wi-Fi and emotional support. They are custodians of civilisation.
Until that happens, the barbarians will remain at the gate, and the experts will keep calling for reforms that treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease.
