A 42-year-old mother, a 24-year-old son, the open window of a Fiat with Skopje plates and twenty metres of asphalt. That is the full distance along which, according to police, the son dragged his own mother through a village in the Petrovec municipality.

It happened at 18:50 on 25 July. According to the Skopje Interior Ministry statement, the young man grabbed his mother through the open car window and dragged her about twenty metres, then left her there and drove off. The woman sustained bodily injuries and was taken to the St. Naum of Ohrid public hospital for treatment. He was detained at 20:30 - an hour and forty minutes after the incident.

What stands out is not the speed of the arrest, which was fine. What stands out is that domestic violence in Macedonia almost always reaches the public only once there is an injury and a hospital. There is no version of this event in which it is the first time somebody showed aggression. There is only a version in which nobody had reported it until now, or a report was filed and went nowhere.

What follows is documentation of the case and a criminal complaint. There will also be comments about „the son from hell”, as if this were some anomaly rather than part of a much wider, well-documented problem that institutions deal with after the fact instead of before it.

The question that remains is whether the woman gets anything more than medical care and the status of an injured party in proceedings. A protective order, a safe place, follow-up on the case. That is the difference between a state that responds and a state that merely records.