December the 21st, 2024 – Yesterday was marked by tragedy. Today has been marked as a national day of mourning. A child psychiatrist has spoken on the devastating Prečko school attack: Our society is seriously unwell.
As Index vijesti/news writes, yesterday’s horrendous Prečko school attack has shown that the Croatian school system has not acted preventively. A seven-year-old child lost his life, and five other people were injured and require hospital treatment.
“We pretended to be better than we actually are”
Child psychiatrist Professor Katarina Dodig Ćurković, said in an interview with Novi list that Croatia had successfully deceived itself into believing that it was better than others. Nobody thought something like this would ever occur in this country.
“I’ve been a child psychiatrist for 25 years and I feel like telling people who claim these to be isolated incidents to finally ask people in the system, in social services, the police, healthcare and elsewhere think. We need to actually look at what we’re dealing with here and what our options are to do anything about it,” she said.
society’s diagnosis: seriously unwell
According to Dodig Ćurković, the problem isn’t only in children, but in society as a whole, which is seriously unwell. She stressed that the system faces major constraints – from a lack of police powers and social welfare resources to the overburdening of professionals trying to work with neglected and abused children.
“The police said they weren’t surprised, and I have to say I’m not surprised either. This has become completely out of control,” added the seasoned child psychiatrist about the Prečko school attack in which a child was murdered.
She pointed out that a permissive parenting style, which she calls socially acceptable child neglect, is contributing to the creation of generations of young people without control.
“We’ve got a new generation coming up that I really don’t know how to deal with. They have all the rights, they are defiant, they’re rude, they break things at home, and now we’re seeing them picking up knives. And no one can do anything to them. We have two situations here, on the one hand we have normal, caring parents who try hard, and yet these parents have no rights.
On the other hand,we have a generation of parents who are completely inadequate, who don’t care about their children at all, and they can have ten or more of them for who knows what motivations,” said Katarina Dodig Ćurković.
technology is too readily available
Dodig Ćurković believes that the ease of the availability of technology and the negative influence of the media also play an important role. Children watch content that glorifies aggression and inappropriate behaviour, while parents often don’t even bother to set limits.
When asked whether the availability of new tech to young people, sometimes even very young children, plays an important role in all this, she answered: “Of course it does.”
According to her, children are given too much freedom, and if any attempts are made to take it away, parents shy away because their child becomes upset. Another thing, she said, is that they watch everything and anything and listen to mentally unwell, aggressive people who impress naive minds as socially acceptable and successful people.
Who is responsible?
When looking specifically at this case, this child psychiatrist says that the Prečko school attack was only a matter of time. This is emphasised by the fact that social workers, teachers and the police are all powerless.
“The worst thing for me is that someone’s child has now died. We send our children to school and shouldn’t need to worry whether they’ll come back home alive,” she concluded.
