Symbolic abuse © Harald Oppitz (KNA)
For a long time, the prevailing opinion in the Protestant church was that there were few cases of abuse there. Under prere from victims, the EKD now wants to address sexualized violence within its own ranks.
Kerstin Claus was 14 years old when she turned to her Protestant pastor in a difficult family situation. He promised to take care of them. What he associated with it was not clear to her at the time, according to Claus. The priest harassed her, sexually assaulted her and abused her until she was 17. For many years, she said, she then received no real support when she approached the Bavarian regional church.
Claus told her story last year at the synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD). Above all, the bishop of the North Church, Kirsten Fehrs, had ensured that she was the first person ever to speak before the synod. Fehrs and Claus had met in Berlin in 2018 at a hearing on abuse in the church.
No individual cases
For Fehrs, it became clear at that time: Not only the Catholic Church, but also the Protestant Church urgently needs to deal with abuse in its own ranks. Previously, high-ranking EKD representatives had also emphasized that there was no such thing as structural abuse as in the Catholic Church; at best, it was a matter of individual cases.
Fehrs was already able to point out that this was not the case: She had replaced her predecessor Maria Jepsen as bishop of the North Elbian Church in 2011. Jepsen had resigned after being accused of failing to act on tips in a serious abuse case in her area of office. In Ahrensburg, a pastor had abused young people for years.
Prere on the Protestant church intensified when the Catholic German Bishops' Conference presented its major abuse study in fall 2018, which revealed a shocking number of cases of sexualized violence. Fehrs was finally able to assert herself and place the topic on the agenda of the synod.
The church assembly decided to set up a council of representatives for protection against sexualized violence and a contact point for those affected. Moreover, there are independent commissions on the subject in the regional churches. Protection against sexualized violence has been established as a task in an EKD-wide violence protection guideline. And a study was promised.
Now it becomes concrete
This commitment is now becoming concrete: the study is to clarify "which special risk factors for abuse exist in the Protestant church and the diaconia, for example, in relation to children and youth work, youth camps and scout work," Fehrs said in Hanover on Thursday. Not only pastors, but also other full-time and part-time employees as well as volunteers would be taken into consideration. "We want to come to terms with what has happened without reservation, in order to ensure that future suffering and violence in the church and diaconia are prevented in the best possible way," Fehrs emphasized.
Starting in October, an independent research network will examine the causes and characteristics of sexualized violence in the Protestant Church in several sub-studies. The study, estimated to cost 3.6 million euros, is expected to produce results within three years. It will be "intensively" accompanied by those affected, so the 20 regional churches had decided on Wednesday evening.
Estimates suggest that the number of victims in the Protestant church may be similar to that in the Catholic church, even though the victim and perpetrator profiles sometimes differ significantly between the denominations.
Last year, the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Ulm, Jorg Fegert, presented a study according to which there are about 114 cases of sexual violence in institutions of both churches.000 victims of sexual abuse should exist. Fegert had 2.500 people surveyed and the numbers extrapolated. Another 2014 study, which examined abuse in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in northern Germany, described the Protestant church as a closed system characterized by a lack of controls and a strong sense of narcissism among the accused.