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"It's actually too early to talk about it today," moderated Maischberger on September 4 in the ARD to Wolfgang Kubicki, "but you said before the show that you know him." This was - the 37th minute of the program - the prelude to talking all the more rightly: Metzelder. Maischberger pronounced the name haltingly and questioningly ("Met-zel-der?") As if she hardly remembered him: Any sensationalist journalism, that was the message of this comedic insert, is far from me. One may certainly assume that Mr. Kubicki did not mention by chance when chatting before the broadcast, he also knows Mr. Metzelder next to Mr. Müller and Mrs. Meier, whereupon Mrs. Maischberger, who found it "actually too early", immediately wrote enthusiastically on her moderation card and the topic was no longer too early. It is also a little comprehensible explanation, they want to talk about a topic for which it is "actually too early", because a guest know the person concerned.
But the talk master was sufficiently informed: "A large German daily newspaper", she said, had reported the suspicion against the footballer Metzelder to have spread child pornographic writings (§ 184b StGB). On the subject, which should not really talk about, she then asked: "Can you do that?" Defense lawyer Kubicki noted that he considered the coverage "outrageous", pointing out that any charges of rape or sexual abuse of children, regardless of their legitimacy, would result in lifelong stigmatization. "That was with Kachelmann so ...", so Kubicki, "that was completely innocent ...."
At this point Maischberger interrupted him with a remarkable pantomime: She pulled up her shoulders and eyebrows, rolled her eyes up, spread her arms, pursed her lips and rocked her head: Do you know? In addition she said: "He has been acquitted," which obviously meant the opposite of "completely innocent". After a remark from the off, she tried to cover her derailment by declaring incoherently: "I did not look that way, but the question is actually, you said yes, we have to learn something about it this case?" A great question! However, if ever this question was not portrayed by pantomimetic "gaze", then by the enterprising Mrs. M. This was confirmed for those who did not trust their own eyes, by the further discussion course: what one "in this case" could interested interested no second.
Max Kohr / WDR
Wolfgang Kubicki visits Sandra Maischberger in the program on 4 September 2019
The presenter, in true frankness, thus demonstrated exactly what Kubicki had described and described as "insolence": when it comes to sexual offenses, even a final acquittal does not lead to a rehabilitation of the accused. He is rather under the heading "can be, can not be" filed. The suspicion remains available and will be revived for years for any purpose and time as biographical "info", referred to as "controversial" or "ultimately unproven" or, as in the case of Kachelmann, as so-called opinion.
Well, Metzelder. How the path of suspicion from the "tipster" to the "Bild" and the prosecutor's office in Hamburg went is in turn the subject of legitimate interest. In any case, "Bild" was on time to meet the civic duty to support prosecutions (Reichelt) and, moreover, to attend the public prosecutor's search. The heart-for-children's report has been given an example. The fact that even an "ex-prosecutor" could be found, who revealed with photo and mention of his firm, "what threatens him (Metzelder)" (the legal punishment threat, which everyone can read with three clicks), there was an almost natural service for the reader.
The whole thing has two aspects that are closely linked: a formal and a contentual one. The first is seemingly simple, the second more difficult. To both a few comments.
It is the presumption of innocence
So well, except "Bild", probably nobody felt this time. Whether that was due to the moral or because it was too late, may be left behind. The former professional football player Metzelder can pass as a "person of contemporary history" in the press law sense, so that a suspicion reporting under attribution and with photos in principle is admissible. The term is, as we know, in reality extremely iridescent: Actually, it only describes the reporting of a suspicion . All too often, however, this translates into a "guilty verdict" in the sense of an advance confirmation of an accusation. To report as quickly as possible on as many distressing moments is the dream of the "investigative".
Section 152 (2) StPO reads as follows:
"(The Public Prosecutor's Office) is ... obliged to intervene for all traceable offenses, if there are sufficient real evidence";and Paragraph 160 (1) and (2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure:
"As soon as the prosecutor's office becomes aware of the suspicion of a criminal offense, it has to investigate the matter in its resolution as to whether the public claim should be filed." The public prosecutor's office has not only the circumstances to be charged, but also those for relief to investigate and collect the evidence the loss of which must be obtained. "DPA
"Picture" editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt
It follows that a "preliminary investigation", as the name implies, neither presupposes nor establishes guilt, but examines an accusation. At the beginning there is a mere "initial suspicion". If the existence of an offense is not precluded from the start, this level has already been reached. In the end is - subject to some possibilities for minor acts - a decision of the public prosecutor: recruitment or indictment (§ 170 StPO)? If an indictment is made, be it by indictment or a request for a fine, the court decides. And before a criminal order has become final or after a trial a conviction has taken place, a criminal guilt is not established.
Unimpressed by this, a completely different picture has spread in public opinion: "Now the public prosecutor's office" is one of those sentences that every reader, listener or spectator knows from revelatory stories and which are almost used and understood as a synonym of a "provisional verdict" , All the more advanced, not infrequently only as a blanking clause without substantive value, affects a clause attached to the end of broad accusations of accusation, according to which "the presumption of innocence applies". Also in the case of Metzelder there was no lack of such assurances: "Bild" anyway; the ARD had the presumption of innocence alive and the connection to the accused "rest"; a pious professor and foundation curator, referred to medically as "colleague" Metzelders, resigned from the foundation of the suspect and assured that it was the presumption of innocence .... And "Focus" reported that the evaluation of data media will continue; "Until then, the presumption of innocence applies." Well, she's a bit longer.
But the presumption of innocence, explicitly found in the European Convention on Human Rights, is not an instruction for people's thinking or journalists. Therefore, conversely, their use as a mantra, with which one can ostensibly put each and every prepostery judgment back into the stage of objective reporting, is exceedingly dishonest. It comes as everyone knows, not on whether at the end of a media report, which causes the social destruction of the person concerned, a letter of indulgence in the form of the innocence phrase is attached. There are particularly perfidious ways of dealing with the presumption of innocence. One is to shed crocodile tears about social exclusion and release for public extermination, which you operate yourself, and to reclaim money from it. This is simple: in parallel with news about trivialities of the process, one brings the play "So is his mother crying" or "What will become of his children?"
The beautiful assumption has made a steep career and is now itself the decoration of suspicions that do not deal with criminal behavior, but - for example - with the 30-year-old grapsche of a now 78-year-old tenor on the bosom of a retired today, but continue traumatized soprano. The presumption of innocence led to the maestro being allowed to sing for the time being in the incomparable Elbphilharmonie. Such news is seriously on page one.
Above all, however, the conjecture is an accolade of harmlessness, to which the loudest and wildest suspects and destroyers lend themselves. The editor-in-chief of "Bild" was asked by DLF on 10th September:
"You say that you have not prejudged Christoph Metzelder, but you have reported relatively luridly a headline was: 'Here Fahnder Metzelder get out of the sports school' This means in the figurative sense: Here someone is taken away, but he was even not arrested. "Answer:
And then you say he was not arrested at all, but that's not there either (... ...) The headline here was the facts: Here the police pick Christoph Metzelder at the Hennef sports school, which is exactly what happened there. "That's how it is with innocence. Between " investigators pick him up from the sports school" and "The police picks him up in the sports school", the editor-in-chief can see no difference, and he can not recognize a "figurative sense". You have to get that done.
On every picture the horror
Now the harder part! One question: Do you know the Minister of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia? If you answer, of course, that Mr. Herbert Reul is known to you, you are wrong. The Minister responsible for the prosecution of crimes is Peter Biesenbach. The widespread impression that in North Rhine-Westphalia the prosecution was completely taken over by the police is due to the tireless efforts of the local Minister of the Interior, who not only personally supervises the seizure of tobacco and - subject to judicial independence - provides small tips on sentencing, but plans to do so especially the war against the sexual abuse of children (§§ 176, 176a StGB) and the dissemination of child pornographic writings (§ 184b StGB) like to explain his most important concern. You could think of worse goals; On the other hand, the choice of this favorite project for a Minister of the Interior, who is rather responsible for quite a few other things, seems surprising.
Behind this is the phenomenon that these offenses, their persecution and the so-called fight against them, are of paramount, symbolic, emotional, media and legal significance. That was not always so. In principle, one can be quite happy that a repression and trivialization of the abuses mentioned have long since ceased to take place. Conversely, it can also be considered with some concern that the weight of the content of the deeds in the public discussion tends to exceed reasonable proportions, and that the general "struggle" threatens to assume an irrational, almost religious character, in which every differentiation falls by the wayside and Any reminder of moderation is defamed as a bad "belittlement".
This translates, apart from the irrationally increased punitive needs of the public, to the requirements for the legal handling of corresponding cases. When the Detmold district court recently announced the verdict in the Lügde case, it was widely reported that the president of the criminal court had "hardly found words" at the verdict to describe the horror of the deeds; she asserted that she was "bewildered" and so on. If that were the case, I would not consider it a pleasing sign of human sympathy, but rather a dubious emphasis on an over-enthusiastic emotionalisation that would no longer want to forgive judges if they were not sufficiently affected " list.
Heavy sexual abuse of children is one thing, not serious abuse another, possession or dissemination of child pornography a third. And for each of these three offenses there is again a wide range of mild, average, severe and particularly severe cases. The idea that every act of abuse inevitably leads to the lifelong suffering of the victim is wrong. Reporting and a stimulated public imagination that no longer distinguish between wild speculation about an American multimillionaire who pays $ 200 for "massages" and sadistic motives for infatuating toddlers, but indulge in superlatives of "disgust", miss everyone Sense.
This also applies to acts according to § 184b StGB. Almost a whole page and the page-spanning headline "On every picture can be the horror" dedicated about the Frankfurt Sunday newspaper of September 8, a report on the "horror job" of investigators in the LKA North Rhine-Westphalia (where else?), The child pornographic representations search on seized media or on the Internet. Now this activity is certainly burdened with unpleasant details. A "horror job", a trip into the abyss, a life under difficult traumatizing circumstances is not. Even when working as a paramedic, forensic doctor, drug counselor, family helper, prosecutor or criminal judge people do not break row after row under the "horror", the other is done. It is unrealistic and useful to always report on child pornography as if it were all about portraying the most serious acts of severe physical violence against very young children. They occur, but are not the rule.
Of the 63,700 investigations for "sexual assault" offenses, which covered police crime statistics for 2018 (1.1% of the total number of reported acts), 7450 acts involved distribution or possession of child pornography. According to judicial prosecution statistics, a total of 1,850 people were convicted of such acts in 2017, including 1,050 imprisonment, of which 980 were suspended. The number of convictions for sentences up to one year was 801, that over two years 26. This is not because the criminal courts are infested with incomprehensible leniency, but because most acts do not embody "horror" and not hard are. Apart from the sensational "horror" one must make it clear that child pornography is indeed a single virtual image showing a person under 14 in a sexually explicit pose. Not all culprits are addictive monsters that stimulate horror in the depths of the darknet. They exist, but they are not the rule. Not every second petit-bourgeois single-family dwelling lives in "horror".
Demonization is just as irrational and as a trivialization
§ 184b StGB is an apron offense. It does not assume that a child has actually been sexually abused, and does not regularly do so. The act, which is punished there, takes place only once in the imagination: punishable is the viewing of forbidden pictures. That this is considered a criminal injustice is not self-evident. It is even quite strange in § 184a StGB: As "animal pornography" the possession of images is punished, on which a sexual behavior can be seen, which is not even punishable. The actual execution of the actions, which the humor artist Böhmermann once gave to a foreign president, would not be punishable by us - but possession of a scribble drawing of it.
Demonizing child and adolescent pornography is as irrational and damaging as trivializing hard deeds. It must be clear that the possession of a construction manual for nuclear bombs is unpunished, the possession of a (!) Painted (!) Picture of the bare bosom of a 13-year-old but is threatened with imprisonment of three years.
I certainly do not represent the general impunity of child pornography. But you have to oppose a little useful, counterproductive hysterization here, too. And one must occasionally recall the extent to which our society is publicly sexualized and almost manic-focused on youthful sexuality: in advertising, fashion, show business, leisure, entertainment industry. The "purity," innocence, and extreme vulnerability that is attributed and imputed to children today is often just the psychologically twisted flip side of self-reflection, identification with idealized childishness, and unrestrained sexualization of the entire life context.