Assaults in the SOS Children’s Village: Other people affected are reporting
Munich
After the attacks in an SOS Children’s Village became known, other suspected victims came forward. Since then, four have 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 dialogue 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 inflicted “suffering” on children entrusted to them. There is talk of a “climate of fear” and “border crossing”. Former residents accuse both women of dying of having committed “child-safe border crossings” from the beginning of the 2000s to around 2015.
The specific incidents should, for example, be about showering together or hygiene measures that violate the shame boundaries of the children. In addition, a five-year-old girl is said to have been locked up alone in a dark cellar, and a boy had to sleep in slippers because his village mother had taped them to his feet with tape.
No further information was received about these two specific accused, said the children’s village spokeswoman. After the study was published, the SOS Children’s Village 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 taken place recently,” said the psychologist. “I make an urgent recommendation that a catch-up should be done here.”
According to the Children’s Village Association, between the introduction of an internal contact point and monitoring point for border crossings that are dangerous to children in 2010, a total of 52 former carers had reported up to the publication of the study. This lived in a children’s village between the 1960s and 2015. This also includes cases that occurred a long time ago. So far, recognition payments have also been made in 21 cases “in the case of experiences of abuse”.
SOS Children’s Villages 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 in 2019 is expected to be 1.4 billion euros.
dpa-infocom, dpa: 211031-99-803014 / 3
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