Elisabeth Kurz* will never forget that scene at the S-Bahn station: she walked past a kissing couple with her son Peter, who was about seventeen at the time.

"All of a sudden he yanked my sleeve and yelled, 'Get that off, get that off!'

I asked what he meant and he exclaimed: 'Tight pants!'

That's when it dawned on me that he probably had an erection.”

Catherine Hummel

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Peter is autistic.

His memory is photographic, but he has little empathy for other people and cannot follow complex conversations.

When he speaks, his speech is often slurred.

Physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and psychologists have looked after his mental and physical well-being from an early age.

But when he hit puberty, Kurz, a social worker by profession, suddenly had the feeling "that there were needs that Peter couldn't live out".

When his sister's friends came to visit, he never left their side or sat on their laps.

When he was alone in his room, he tried to masturbate without success.

"It broke my heart to see him like this.

I then had these thoughts: 'I fed him, I cut his hair - why can't I teach him that too?'

But that wasn't possible - I'm only human and have a certain inhibition threshold."

Men become more peaceful, calmer, more confident

She's not the only one there.

"Relatives are often either helpless or they don't want to admit it when they realize that their father with dementia or their mentally handicapped son wants to," says Natascha Mesic, department manager at the Rudolf Schloer Foundation, a Protestant nursing home for the elderly in Moers, in which also has mentally handicapped residents.

And yet there's no denying it: people with intellectual disabilities are also interested.

And when they can't act it out, they either suffer silently, harm themselves, or harass those who care for them.

So when Mesic read about the possibility of "sexual support" in a geriatric care magazine, she thought: "That could be the solution to our problem." This calculation worked out.

Every two months, a resident with dementia drives from the facility to a sex companion;

his legal guardian has agreed, and the man pays for it himself. "It's like an excursion," explains Mesic.

And yet much more.

"There is something like a relaxation, the men become more peaceful, calmer, often more self-confident - I think because they were able to live out their needs together with another person," says Catharina König from Bochum, one of the few sexual companions in Germany who can make a living from their work.

Sexual accompaniment usually means caressing, closeness, physical contact, massage and sexual satisfaction without kissing, sexual intercourse or oral sex.

And all this coupled with emotional attention.

It's something different than classic prostitution, say the sex workers.

König puts it this way: "The cinema in my head, that with the dingy things - that has nothing to do with my work."