Sexual abuse

Just over a year ago Germany was rocked by reports of widespread child abuse in the years immediately following World War II.

The allegations were targeted at the Catholic Church and church or state-run orphanages in particular.

But a new study, released in Berlin on Wednesday, revealed that institutional child abuse is still alarmingly prevalent.

The report, conducted by the German Youth Institute, found that suspected cases of abuse were registered in 70 percent of all orphanages over the last three years.

In 82 percent of cases, the alleged victims were female, news agency AFP reported. In half of all cases, the suspected culprits were under the age of 14.

The findings, which were gathered from about 1,500 orphanages, as well as ordinary schools and boarding schools, sparked outrage from child protection agencies on Wednesday.

"The topic is so omnipresent in teaching institutions that we cannot simply put it to one side," said Thomas Rauschenbach, the director of the German Youth Institute.

"We need a new awareness among teachers about the responsibilities they have towards young people," he added.

Victim support

Thomas Schlingmann, an activist for Tauwetter, an organization which counsels men who were child victims of sexual abuse, also firmly placed the blame with the institutions themselves.

"Many institutions, like orphanages or schools, have not yet done enough to make it easy for the abused to find somebody to speak to," he said.

He told Deustche Welle, however, that steps were being taken in the right direction.

"The German bishop's conference has decided to investigate the abuse scandal further," Schlingmann said. "Church leaders are planning two research projects aimed at understanding motives by the perpetrators and the effects it has on victims."

But Christine Bergmann, the German government's special commissioner for child abuse cases, warned that identifying potential victims is extremely difficult.

"We have to admit that there's still a grave lack of research in specific areas. We know little for instance about sexual harassment among handicapped youngsters," she said.

Little is also known "about cases of sexual abuse among young people with a migrant background. So, there's still a lot of work ahead," she added.

Bergmann recently established a child abuse hotline to identify cases of child abuse.

She claimed that almost 20,000 calls were received by the hotline in the space of a year, indicating that the problem remained widespread in Germany.

Author: Hardy Graupner, Berlin / ccp

Editor: Michael Lawton