The year 2010 marked a shift in attitudes towards child sexual abuse in the German-speaking world (Andresen & Demant, 2017). In January of that year, Father Klaus Mertes, the headmaster of Canisius-Kolleg, a Jesuit-run secondary school in Berlin, publicly said that he believed statements by former students who had described being sexually violated by clergy at the school (Mertes, 2013). Moreover, he stressed the responsibility the Church bore for the acts, as well as the lack of assistance provided to the victims and the cover-up which took place within the Church. In a book based on his experiences, Matthias Katsch, a former student at the school and founder of Square Table (Eckiger Tisch), an initiative representing the victims, writes of the events of 2010, describing how difficult it was to get survivors to speak up and participate in the discussion of causes, responses, and strategies (Katsch, 2020).
In 2010, a discussion finally took place in Germany of society’s responsibility for past child sexual abuse and for protecting children and adolescents in the present. This quickly revealed the considerable shortcomings in the available research, for example on the prevalence of abuse and past occurrences. Germany’s policy makers responded by implementing the following measures: establishing a temporary Roundtable on Child Sexual Abuse (Runder Tisch sexueller Kindesmissbrauch), appointing an Independent Commissioner for Child Sexual Abuse Issues (Unabhängiger Beauftragter für Fragen des sexuellen Kindesmissbrauchs),Footnote 5 initiating research programs on the subject,Footnote 6 and launching a complementary support systemFootnote 7 and national telephone helpline.Footnote 8 In 2016, a Council of Victims and Survivors (Betroffenenrat) began collaborating with the Independent Commissioner,Footnote 9 as did the Inquiry.
Victims of child sexual abuse had described their experiences long before 2010, and clarifying how it was possible for this knowledge and the resulting discourse to be marginalized, as has happened on an international scale, remains a worthwhile topic of investigation (Lewis Herman, 1981; Rush, 1980).
In 2010, the efforts to work through child sexual abuse in Germany did not start “from scratch.” In addition to reports by commissions investigating past abuse in other countries, the Inquiry could draw on earlier works such as Väter als Täter (Fathers as Perpetrators),Footnote 10 an expose by Barbara Kavemann, who is member of the Inquiry, and Ingrid Lohstöter from 1984, and experiences gained by specialized counseling centers and self-help groups (Kavemann & Lohstöter 1984).
Availing itself of past social-scientific approaches to investigating child sexual abuse, the Inquiry was able to begin its work, predicated on the following hypothesis: when children and adolescents are subjected to sexual violence, revelation and secrecy collude—to the victims’ detriment. In light of the testimony given by survivors of such violence, this hypothesis has become a well-documented truth. The public often glosses over the silence maintained by others, speaking instead of the victims’ reluctance to come forward and thus ignoring the manifold types of dependence young people experience within society’s generational power structures. The Inquiry is focusing on this aspect, since, in addition to enduring an act or acts of violence, children and adolescents frequently received no assistance or support even after confiding in another person.
Initially established in 2016 and given a 3-year mandate which was extended for an additional five in 2019, the Inquiry is tasked with investigating the extent, nature, causes, and consequences of sexual abuse in institutions and family contexts in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to the present. Its main methods for achieving this are conducting closed hearings of survivors and other witnesses; creating a database and clarifying how archiving will take place; organizing public hearings and conferences which are streamed live and which can be viewed online afterwards; holding “workshop discussions” and documenting them; and releasing case studies, statements, and recommendations (IICSAG, 2018, 2019a).
Serving in a voluntary capacity, the Inquiry’s seven members come from a range of disciplines and professions—education, sexology and psychotherapy, sociology, social psychology. A former Federal Minister of Family Affairs, a former President of a Higher Regional Court, and a survivor are members. They are supported by a team of professional assistants and receive critical input from survivors of child sexual abuse, especially from members of the council representing survivors and from Germany’s Independent Commissioner for Child Sexual Abuse Issues. The fulcrum of the Inquiry’s work is inviting people to speak who were subjected to sexual violence during their childhood and/or adolescence, and encouraging them and other witnesses to share their experiences (Andresen, 2015, 2019). Since May 2016, more than 2200 people have registered to speak, close to 1200 hearings have been held, and more than 400 submissions of written testimony have been received (IICSAG, 2019b).
Inquiries in other countries have primarily examined child sexual abuse in institutional settings (Wright, 2017). Many victims, however, experienced sexual abuse in their family environment, which is why the German Inquiry is investigating this context as well. An ongoing focal point is child sexual abuse in the family and the role of child welfare authorities and family courts. Other topics addressed during the Inquiry’s first term were child sexual abuse in the German Democratic Republic (IICSAG, 2020; Sachse et al., 2018) in the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany (IICSAG, 2019b) and organized sexual violence (Nick et al., 2018, 2019). Other key topics in the Inquiry’s second term have been abuse in sports, sexual violence against people with disabilities, and pedo-sexual networks from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Certain formats are especially important for working through past injustices, namely those that allow survivors and other experts to speak of their childhood experiences; to recount how the abuse has continued to affect them throughout their lives; to explain why they pressed criminal charges or did not do so; to describe what it was like to confide in someone else; to state which changes they would like society to introduce in order to deal with child sexual abuse; and to express concrete demands for policy makers. Through hearings and the careful reading and documentation of written testimony, the Inquiry is creating a proto-archive in which individual stories are gathered, thereby producing a “collective memory.” This makes it possible to ascertain how often children and adolescents, and the signals they sent, were simply discounted and ignored at different times in East and West Germany, in different social contexts, and in educational institutions. The hearings and written testimony document sexual violence and the many instances in which silence was maintained in the victims’ social environments. Both illustrate the powerlessness of children and adolescents as particularly vulnerable individuals at the intersection of generational and gender hierarchies. It therefore seems fitting to include here an extended passage from the Inquiry’s summary report, since it will allow a number of survivors to have their say:
In retrospect a majority of the survivors recount that they sent signals which others within their social environment should have recognized.
I ‘broadcast’ clear signals in my childhood – by suddenly acting out, for example – which teachers and doctors should have responded to. Survivor
Others withdrew and attempted not to be conspicuous.
Well, I always felt like I was in the way, you know? Which meant being invisible was the best thing. Survivor
For various reasons, others developed the need to excel in school or at sports. Some made an extra effort, trying to maintain a semblance of normality and boost their ego by doing well in school. Others used athletic achievements to compensate for their social isolation, or deployed the iron discipline they learned in sports to suppress their emotions and pain.
Another group reports that they developed aggressive, rebellious, or confrontational attitudes. These changes were sometimes seen as deviant behavior—especially in East Germany—which needed to be punished, for example by having the individual in question institutionalized (IICSAG, 2019b, p.179).
Another collective experience documented by the hearings and written testimony is the lack of help given to victims of sexual violence.
I’ve now come to believe that my uncle was aware of it, and my aunt. My step-mother naturally, she once burst into the room. My grandfather, too, but because of the war, of course – he had his own problems. Yet no one bothered to speak up and say: Hey, are you crazy? You can’t do that to a child. Survivor (IICSAG, 2019b, p.184).
These extended excerpts from the 2019 summary report illustrate how the Inquiry’s publications, research projects, and commissioned case studies focus on the hearings and written testimony, and how they cite the survivors at length (after the latter have given their consent). By drawing on the hearings and reports and by developing a new website called My Story (Meine Geschichte) (IICSAG, 2019b),Footnote 11 the Inquiry wants to highlight the importance that bearing witness has for coming to terms with childhood injustices, while preserving testimony for the future. In view of their work in Sweden, childhood researcher Johanna Sköld and archival scholar Åsa Jensen attest to the necessity of this approach, including for international inquiries into past injustices and for the concept of Transitional Justice. Moreover, they show that hearings—of former residents of institutions, for example—do not obviate the need for viewing and analyzing the material on file—on the contrary (Sköld & Jensen, 2015). They argue for recognizing the extraordinary significance of archives and call for resources to be allocated so that the files held by social, pedagogical, psychiatric, and other medical institutions can be preserved, processed, and accessed. One example of how this can be done is Switzerland’s Federal Law for Coming to Terms with Compulsory Care Measures before 1981 (Bundesgesetz über die Aufarbeitung der fürsorgerischen Zwangsmassnahmen und Fremdplatzierungen vor 1981).Footnote 12 At the same time, Sköld and Jensen describe the challenges inherent to such an undertaking:
Victims’ testimonies have been accepted as sufficient for inquiries into the past, making previously unheard stories known to a broader audience, but when these narratives risk challenging the national identity or identifying and convicting perpetrators, or when financial compensation to the victim is involved, critics have insisted on stories being tested against the official perspectives reflected in archival records and other forms of written evidence (IICSAG, 2019b, p.159).
The tensions present in this nexus of survivors’ narratives, archived files, and sociopolitical interests show how initiatives addressing childhood abuses are embedded in the concept of transitional justice. When efforts are made to address past wrongs and exercise “transitional justice” in the truest sense, new historical and cultural narratives can arise that are of general societal interest—and that often result in conflict. Moreover, as Sköld and Jensen note, such efforts frequently lead to the question of granting compensation for the injustices suffered.