A study on an SOS Children’s Village in Bavaria uncovered terrifying things at the beginning of the month: two village mothers are said to have tortured their protégés, and there is also talk of sexual assault.
Munich – After attacks in an SOS Children’s Village became known, other alleged victims came forward. Four have since made contact with the SOS Children’s Village Association, said a spokeswoman for the German Press Agency.
With two of them, however, the association has “been in contact for a long time”. At the beginning of October, the association published a study by the renowned abuse expert Heiner Keupp. This shows that two former employees of a children’s village in Bavaria caused “suffering” to children entrusted to them. There is talk of a “climate of fear” and “crossing borders”. Former residents accuse the two women of having committed “child welfare-endangering border crossings” from the early 2000s until around 2015.
The specific allegations should, for example, be about showering together or hygiene measures that violate the children’s limits of shame. In addition, a five-year-old girl is said to have been locked alone in a dark cellar, and a boy had to sleep in slippers because his village mother had taped them to his feet.
The children’s village spokeswoman said that no further information was received about these two specific accused. After the study was published, the SOS Children’s Villages Association announced that it wanted to systematically deal with cases of abuse in all facilities in Germany. The chairwoman of the association, Sabina Schutter, is planning a nationwide research project in cooperation with, among others, the University of Münster and the German Youth Institute in Munich.
Keupp had also called for consequences: “A really systematic review has not yet taken place,” said the psychologist. “I make an urgent recommendation that a catch-up should be done here.”
According to the Children’s Village Association, since the introduction of an internal contact and monitoring point for border crossings that were dangerous to children in 2010, a total of 52 former carers had reported up to the publication of the study. According to the information, they lived in a children’s village between the 1960s and 2015. This also includes cases that were a long time ago. To date, recognition payments have also been made in 21 cases “in the event of abuse”.
SOS Children’s Villages is home to 65,000 children in 137 countries and supports a further 347,000 people with social programs. According to the latest annual report, income from donations and government aid amounted to 1.4 billion euros in 2019. dpa
