In Sarajevo, in the Dobrinja neighbourhood, Elma Godinjak - a 41-year-old journalist - was killed by her own husband. Tarik Prusac, 49, shot his wife and then her brother as well, and fled with their five-year-old daughter. After a multi-hour police chase across Sarajevo he was arrested. The child was found alive and unharmed.

Prusac worked in security and had professional experience with firearms. That detail matters. The killing was by handgun, inside the family home, after a coldly planned send-off of the wife. This is not „he snapped". This is a man who had spent years knowing exactly how a weapon works, and at the moment he refused to accept a divorce, he put that knowledge to use.

Context matters. The couple was in divorce proceedings. According to Elma's family, Prusac would not accept the divorce. He followed her, filmed her, gave her no peace. A textbook case of „a woman wanting to leave a man who won't let her go". And in the Bosnian, Macedonian and Serbian legal systems alike, those cases end badly. Because the institutions react after the event, not before it.

What did we lose today? Not „an entry in the statistics" - not a number in the domestic violence report. We lost a journalist. A woman who worked in the media. Who was writing the historical record of Bosnian society. Who had a five-year-old daughter. That little girl will grow up without her mother, with her father in prison, and with a family that has to pull her through a trauma she did not deserve.

For the Balkan context, this is nothing unusual in recent years. Balkan states, after several decades of rising gender-based violence, have finally codified it as a separate crime. But the sentences remain light. Police react slowly, and courts often accept „emotional state" as a mitigating factor. The result: a killer in prison for 8-12 years, walks out in his fifties, with no consequences for the rest of his life.

The solution is not „harsher sentences". It is prevention. When a woman reports that her husband is following her or threatening her, the state has to react before the tragedy happens. It will not be perfect. It will not stop everything. But at least we will not be telling a five-year-old girl that she lost her mother while we read statistics and write reaction pieces.