Habul: All institutions are to blame for the boy's death

All institutions of the family and child protection system are generally to blame for the horrific murder of the boy in Hadžići, stated Udžejna Habul, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Sarajevo, for the BH News Agency Patria (NAP). She teaches several subjects in the Department of Social Work.

The case of the brutal murder of a four-year-old boy, for which all adult members of his family are accused, still intrigues the BH public. Many are wondering if the institutions should have done more and reacted before the tragedy.

- Now that the evil has happened, we cannot blame only the social work centers and social workers. By the nature of their work, they are responsible in a way, but if they do not have information about it, they cannot react - Habul told NAP.

Everything could have been resolved, she says, based on documentation and a possible visit to the field.

- However, if there were no indications of child abuse at the time, the social work center had no right to intervene in the family's relationships. If the parents of four-year-old Smajo were married and a guardianship process had been initiated, the court would have made the decision and informed the social service, and then a field visit would have occurred, but that did not happen, so the social work center had no information about the relationships in that family – she points out.

Habul says that the Social Work Center was not informed by the Health Center where the child received treatment after a broken arm.

- This city has 60 social workers for about 500,000 inhabitants, and the standard is one social worker per 5,000 inhabitants, one psychologist and one pedagogue per 12,000 inhabitants, one lawyer per 10,000 inhabitants. Centers do not have a sufficient number of experts; the number of experts is not adapted to the social problems in the city municipalities – she states.