Six years after the publication of the study on abuse commissioned by the Catholic Bishops' Conference, an important study on sexual abuse in the Protestant Church was presented this Thursday. The analysis was carried out by an interdisciplinary research group called "ForuM - Research on the treatment of sexualized violence and other forms of abuse in the Evangelical Church and Diakonia in Germany" and funded by the EKD ("Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands"3.6 million, which commissioned it in 2020. The EKD consists of 20 "Landeskirchen" ("regional churches") and represents 19.2 million evangelical Christians throughout Germany.
The most outstanding result of this study, which consists of 871 pages, is that the number of victims of sexual abuse is much higher than expected. But before entering into an analysis of this study, it is important to point out two particularities.
First, while the study on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church ("MGH study," 2018) was confined to consecrated persons, the. ForuM" study affects not only Protestant pastors, but also employees of the so-called "Diakonia", the Protestant institution comparable to "Caritas" in the Catholic sphere.
Secondly, the "MGH study" was carried out on the basis of the personal files in the diocesan curias, a total of 38,156 files. In the case of the "ForuM" study, comprehensive data were only available for one of the 20 District Churches of the EKD. A total of 4,300 disciplinary files, 780 personnel files and some 1,320 other documents were examined. According to EKD Council President Kirsten Fehrs, the Protestant churches did not refuse to cooperate, but they did "worse" than the Catholic dioceses: there was no "deliberate unwillingness", but simply an "unfortunate inability".
These are therefore "projections". The study states: "an estimated total number of 3,497 accused persons (including 1,402 herders) and 9,355 affected persons" since 1946.
This is why, although these figures are much higher than previously assumed, since they were based on some 900 victims of abuse, they are only the "tip of the tip of the iceberg" and a "very selective sample", according to the study coordinator, Martin Wazlawik, professor of social work at the Hannover University of Applied Sciences.
The "ForuM" study refers to the fact that the evangelical church had considered sexual abuse ("sexualized violence") as a problem specific to the Catholic Church or, on the contrary, as a problem of society as a whole, but one that did not particularly affect them.
The prologue to the Study also speaks of a "historicist" tendency: to consider it as a problem confined to the orphanages of the 50s and 60s, or as a passing phenomenon of "sexual liberation" after "68".
As one of the "systemic" or specific causes of evangelical churches, the lack of sufficient control is indicated: not having a religious leader grants a wide autonomy to each pastor, which leads to "a diffusion of responsibility in the complex structures of a Church that in many places attaches great importance to building itself up from below and does not provide for strong supervision with possibilities of intervention". In addition, a certain "laissez-faire" in sex education may have been a feature of specifically Protestant abuse. Specifically, the "ForuM" study speaks of a greater rise of "sexual liberation" than in Catholicism, as well as of the influence of pedagogues such as Helmut Kentler, Gerold Becker and Hartmut von Hentig who, with their "overcoming of limits" in adult-child contacts, favored a "paidosexual" influence on Protestant reform pedagogy and sexual ethics. However, the study admits that "a more detailed analysis and reflection on the influence of various reformist pedagogical currents and possible paidosexual currents is still to be done".
In any case, what the MHG and ForuM studies agree on is that the victims of sexual abuse are approximately two-thirds male: 64.7% of the victims in the Protestant Church were male. Of the offenders, 99.6% were also male; specific to the evangelical churches, three-quarters of the sex offenders were married when they committed their first offense.
Celibacy is not the problem
From this result it can be inferred that celibacy is not, as has been repeated in recent years in the wake of the MHG study, a very important factor, let alone the most decisive one. Even a newspaper not exactly known for its sympathy for the Catholic Church, such as Berlin's "Der Tagesspiegel", stressed in its editorial that the Protestant Church cannot cite celibacy as the main reason for sexual abuse, the most recurrent argument, because it does not exist in the Protestant Church.
The Catholic lay initiative "New Beginnings," which has become known primarily for its opposition to the Synodal Way of the Catholic Church in Germany, said in a statement that this new study has finally put an end to the "persistent narrative of the Synodal Way, according to which abuse has systemic causes of a specifically Catholic character." While systemic structures such as "power imbalances, unclear role models, the ability to manipulate potential perpetrators in asymmetrical relationships" can foster abuse, they are "neither specifically Catholic nor denominational." Where work is done with children and young people, these factors could "systemically" favor abuse; but, according to the initiative, there is no indication of additional "specifically Catholic factors of significant and important effectiveness" in either the Protestant ForuM or the Catholic MHG study. The initiative concludes: "Both studies show that the churches have not been addressing and responding well to the problem of abuse for a long time".
In the Catholic weekly "Die Tagespost", Regina Einig commented that although this study "should not be a source of satisfaction for Catholics", the fact that there are also cases of abuse in the Protestant sphere raises objective questions for the German bishops and allows conclusions to be drawn for the Synodal Path, "since the premises under which it began are proving to be unsustainable". The MHG study pointed to three characteristics of the Catholic Church as factors facilitating sexual abuse: celibacy, the hierarchical structure of the Church and the lack of women in leadership. None of these are present in the Protestant churches, and yet this has not prevented abuse here; "even the Protestant parsonage with a married pastor and a traditional family does not guarantee a safe space".
For the editor of "Die Tagespost", the Catholic Church and the Protestants agree on one thing: "they find it difficult to recognize the negative consequences of the sexual revolution and the ideology of 1968." The "aberrations of sex education, which from the 1960s onwards were responsible for the experiments of sexologists on minors" that denied the suffering of those affected, are "inconceivable without the ideological course set by the 1968 movement". In this context he advocates a posthumous rehabilitation of Benedict XVI: "His criticisms of 1968 in relation to the abuse crisis were not exaggerated."
