“Culture of touching”: The EKD's problem with sexualised violence

One of the - mostly unspoken - self-image of the Evangelical Church is that sexual violence in its own ranks does not have the same extent as in the Catholic Church.

In the meantime, however, it should also have become clear to the last functionary that one is still faced with a problem with the issue: The slow reappraisal damages the credibility of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).

Several synodal meetings have been overshadowed by the topic, including the ongoing meeting in Bremen.

Since the EKD suspended the Advisory Board in the spring, a public battle of interpretation between the church and the victims has broken out.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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It starts with the numbers.

The EKD points out that 942 cases had to be dealt with so far, many of which relate to home education after the war.

Given the size of the institution, that would not be a high number of cases.

Those affected, on the other hand, refer to a study by the Ulm psychiatrist Jörg Fegert, which extrapolated to more than 110,000 affected people.

The EKD only recently initiated more detailed scientific studies.

Behind the Catholic Church on some points?

There is also a dispute over financial “recognition”. The EKD defines a framework of between 5,000 and 50,000 euros in its model order. Victims' representatives complain that this is not enough. In addition, the church makes its own "institutional failure" a condition. The burden of proof is regulated in such a way that the church has to prove its innocence. But even that is not enough for many of those affected, at least not for those who consider the EKD's approach as a whole to be unsuccessful. Opposite them is another group that would like to continue to cooperate pragmatically with the church. The feud between the two was an important reason why the Affected Advisory Council failed.

The Braunschweig regional bishop Christoph Meyns, who is responsible in the EKD, promised on Monday before the synod that “nothing will be left untried in order to find a new, better structure for the participation of those affected”. The promised evaluation of the procedural situation is still pending. The EKD has now commissioned a participation expert. Victims' representatives also express criticism of this and speak of a "unilateral selection" that lacks "any professionalism".

The victims' representatives also complain that the EKD falls behind the Catholic Church on some points in dealing with those affected. A recurring problem is the federal order of the EKD. The more pragmatic victim representatives who appeared in front of the church parliament on Monday also criticized this: the “clumsy federal system” is often used by church representatives as an “excuse”. One level is hiding behind others.

In the process of coming to terms with it, the Evangelical Church is confronted with other of its peculiarities in an unpleasant way: Many of those affected can hardly bear it when the bishops assure them of deeply felt consternation in vague formulations. Karin Krapp, a member of the suspended advisory council for affected persons and herself a pastor, also complains about a “corporate culture of being touched and hugging” in the church. “I call for a cultural change that values ​​distance and questions the culture of touching.” The more radical representatives of those affected raised another point before the beginning of the synod: We know each other within the individual regional churches. Occasionally, the person in charge of solving a case had studied with the suspect.Or a member of their own pastor dynasty was responsible for the fact that a perpetrator was transferred to the local community concerned.

The pragmatic victims 'representatives announced on Monday that a new edition of the previous victims' advisory board was out of the question for them. The Independent Commissioner of the Federal Government, Johannes-Wilhelm Rörig, has proposed to create a position in the EKD analogous to his own and to link the participation of those concerned with it. How it continues is open.

The disputes also have a personnel policy component.

The Hamburg Bishop Kirsten Fehrs was responsible for the processing within the EKD until 2020, before the Brunswick Bishop Meyns took over.

Now Fehrs is a favorite to succeed the EKD Council Chairman Heinrich Bedford-Strohm.

The decision will be made on Tuesday and Wednesday.

That is why it was carefully monitored whether the representatives of those affected were targeting Fehrs as well as Meyns.

They didn't.

After Fehrs regretted in tears that she had taken a “really wrong path” in constructing the Advisory Board, she even received praise from the victim representative Detlev Zander.

The bishop pushed ahead with the reappraisal.

"Ms. Fehrs was the one who was let down, also by many colleagues."