The time of trivializing sexual violence is over

The mother of the main defendant is also imprisoned for five years. She had given the son the arbor, which the 28-year-old had turned into a torture chamber for children and a high-tech room for video production. Giant computers were used there to distribute pedo-criminal representations.

In the trial of the “abuse complex Münster”, the judgments are clear. Everyone, the main perpetrator and the co-defendants, are said to have been in custody for more than ten years, then in preventive detention. The judgment is not yet final.

But it is already clear: Now your eyes are open, you can see more clearly. After waves of revelations in institutions such as boarding schools or sports clubs, more and more pedo-criminal violence emerges from the private sphere, where up to eighty percent of all crimes are committed. Keywords like Staufen, Lügde, Bergisch-Gladbach, Münster stand for the cases.

Crimes that have previously been trivialized are increasingly being taken seriously. Herbert Reul, Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, said on Tuesday with full emphasis: “It used to be like shoplifting, you are stunned!” Investigations revealed four petabytes of data relevant to the crime. This amount, according to Reul, would make an eight kilometer high tower of CDs.

You could see how the Interior Minister Reul’s awareness grew

At Reul, you could almost see how the awareness grew that serious deeds had remained under the public radar. A few years ago, a documentary showed Reul’s face when criminal investigators showed the minister video scenes with sexually tortured children. Reul’s shock could skip, it was so immediately present.

Alarmed and determined, he ensured more emergency services, more resources, better networking of the investigators, better equipment. And he advocated the tightening of criminal law that has now taken place. For a long time, people who knew something stayed out of the way, said Reul, in order not to “denounce” neighbors or relatives.

Today many more people know that it is not about “denouncing”, but about rescue and protection. The Office of the Federal Independent Commissioner for Issues of Child Sexual Abuse, led by Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, has also contributed to this since 2010. His team makes it clear that perpetrators occur in all milieus and, statistically speaking, there is one affected child in every school class.

If all interior ministers acted like Herbert Reul, the dark field would very soon be much brighter. But remnants of shyness, taboos and shame persist, as if many were still afraid of what lurks under the stones that have to be turned over. However, displacement does not help. Rather, like aid and acquiescence, it prolongs suffering while the data towers continue to grow.