Dießen - SOS Children's Villages should be a refuge, a safe place. But it is precisely in this refuge that children are said to have been abused from the early 2000s to 2015. This is the result of a recent study. The incidents are said to have taken place right on the doorstep: in the SOS Children's Village in Dießen. Erich Schöpflin, who was head of the Dießen facility from 2003 to 2016, confirms that this is the Dießen Children's Village.
Former roommates of an SOS Children's Village had complained to the SOS Children's Village Association's internal contact point for borderline threats beyond child welfare. Thereupon the association commissioned an external study: at the “Independent Commission for the Processing of Child Sexual Abuse”, carried out by its member Heiner Keupp, emeritus professor of social psychology at LMU, who has already scientifically dealt with the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic monastery in Ettal. To this end, he interviewed former employees from all areas, including several of the children's village mothers. SOS Children's Villages published the results of the study on its website. It says:"In a large number of actions by the two former employees, border violations that endanger the child's welfare and pedagogical errors took place." According to statements made by those affected, two former children's village mothers are said to have inflicted “suffering” on children from the early 2000s to around 2015 and created a “climate of fear”.
According to its own statements, the SOS Children's Villages organization primarily wants to help children whose parents cannot care for them because of poverty or who experience violence in their families.
If the statements of two people who, according to the Keupp study, “spent a large part of their childhood and adolescence in a children's village” are correct, it hits a deep notch.
Rules and order
According to the study description, Keupp spoke about the incidents in personal conversations with those affected. According to the study, the two children's village mothers “attached great importance to rules and order, but from an insufficiently controlled position of power they decreed arbitrary sanctions, created a climate of fear for the children and created a willingness to submit to them.” According to the report of those affected, this is what drinking is when eating has been banned. If the children did so anyway, they were grabbed by the hair and their heads were knocked together. Even small violations would have been enough for the children to have their mattresses taken away and to have to sleep on the slatted frame. The children should have drunk uneaten food leftovers in pure form. If they didn't get up in the morning, they got cold water on their faces.In addition, they were not allowed to go to the toilet in the morning because it bothered the children's village mother. In the second family, the "Krampus" was stylized as a person of horror. If the children did not obey as expected, they were locked in the dark boiler room. Gifts were collected and the children were often not spoken to for days.
Specific cases of sexual abuse have also been reported.
In the morning, the children had to “file past” naked in front of the children's village mother lying in bed, the pubic area had been checked for “cleanliness”.
The children had to shower with the children's village mother, then put some lotion on them.
According to Keupp in his study, it was not only those affected who gave testimony, but also educational staff and other specialists.
But it was the "initiative of those affected" that ultimately broke the silence about the border violations.
Reached limits
The head of the children's village at the time, Erich Schöpflin, confirmed to the CIRCULAR messenger that the children's village was the facility in Dießen. Keupp also spoke to him as part of his investigation. Before that, he did not know anything about the incidents. It is true that there have always been reports in which the children's village mothers have “reached their limits”. One child had to write the same sentence over and over again for two hours, another had been locked in a room by his children's village mother. "This 'black pedagogy' of the 50s is of course not possible at all," says Schöpflin, who reacted to the incidents accordingly.
But obviously there weren't enough early warning systems, nor the necessary culture of conversation - and that urgently needs to be reflected on. In order to be able to offer an appropriate culture of discussion, the position of a trust educator was introduced around 2007 - “you weren't so naive to think that everything is always okay”. But maybe that was too late in the current cases. Only later, since 2011, has there been a contact point for cross-border risks in Munich. However, the children had already been in contact with each other frequently, including with children outside the children's village. In addition, the youth welfare office comes to the Kinderdorf families once or twice a year and speaks to the children.
According to the study, the incidents could have occurred due to a “transfer deficit” of professional standards that were only partially achieved in this children's village. This is the idea of the children's village founders to create a family replacement through children's village mothers and their “natural motherliness”. In addition, over the course of time, the concept had been installed that competent specialist teams should guarantee the children's personal development.
Keupp said in the study, however, that this was not possible without contradictions.
Because the children's village mothers were autonomous from the start, an autonomy that the respective management accepted.
A claim to power was derived from this.
Even the educational staff in the affected children's village could not have prevented its abuse, as they themselves could not have 'broken' the autonomy, according to Keupp in the study.
And abuse has become possible in these “system niches”.
The 'power' of the children's village mother is now much less, informs Schöpflin.
"It used to be the focus of pedagogy, today that has changed." Among other things, it is in much more extensive "professional reflection".
Criminal complaint filed
The public prosecutor's office in Augsburg has now started investigations after a criminal complaint, as a spokesman for the authority of the German Press Agency in Munich said.
A spokeswoman for SOS Children's Villages said the organization knew about the complaint and was in contact with those affected.
The two children's village mothers have not yet commented on the allegations, emphasizes the press spokeswoman for the aid organization Victoria Leipert.
Keupp contacted both of them.
One has not yet replied, the other had come to the interview with a lawyer and denied everything.
"I deeply regret the suffering that happened to the children entrusted to us," says the chairwoman of the SOS Children's Village Association, Prof. Dr.
Sabina Schutter.
"We are very grateful to the former care recipients for their courage to turn to us." A position for child protection will be established directly with the board to support the specialists in implementing the standards.
There should also be a hotline at the internal reporting office.
The board of directors of the SOS Children's Village Association has already apologized to those affected.
