When the fans go fighting in

When the fans go fighting in

“Belgrade Police directorate members often come across information about previously scheduled fights and we have managed to prevent them from taking place with resolute action, on several occasions so far. However, since the goal of these showdowns is fight for fight’s sake, they manage to find all sorts of reasons to clash even when there is no sporting event involved. The Law on prevention of violence in sports arenas concerns the time before, during and after sporting events, the rest of the violence falls under the Law on disturbance of public order”, Vukolić explains.

Vukolić says that other institutions need to be included in combating hooliganism. “First and foremost, the judiciary needs to work more efficiently to undertake the legal measures against these persons. Then, there’s the work on resocialization of these individuals and groups, and football and other clubs can play a significant role by clearly and unequivocally distancing themselves from these so-called fans, in reality, hooligans”. Vukolić says.

Territories of violence with impunity

Dragan Popadić, a psychologist, told B92 that there is no single explanation for such behavior. “The fact is that our society is flooded with violence, which has lately receded, but not by being banished and branded a negative occurrence, but by claiming new territories where it can be expressed freely and with impunity. That is the problem with the world the young people grow up in, and schools themselves are the territories of verbal violence, which is accepted as the norm by both abusers and the victims”, Popadić says.

“The violence among fans is also considered acceptable, not equally punishable as other forms of violence, and justified. A young man was left to die, and his group did nothing to help him, they had in faact obstructed the emergency services from coming to his aid. That is more than violence – that’s heartlessness and it freezes the blood in one’s veins. It is often said that this is the normal type of behavior as far as fans go, but what we fail to understand is that for people with such mindsets, being a fan represents a ticket to a world of violence with impunity. We are talking about heartless, cruel, asocial persons who use the context of sports for violence”, Popadić concluded.