The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria (ELKB) wants to have all available personnel files examined by external experts for suspected cases of sexual violence. An ELKB spokesman told the SZ on Wednesday. A working group has recently been planning the concrete implementation.
“We envision implementation within two years,” said the spokesman. “To do this, all personnel files that have not yet been digitized must first be digitized.” What is challenging is that a large part of the personnel files are kept decentrally at administrative institutions throughout Bavaria. Regional Bishop Christian Kopp therefore brought up the idea of an external review of the files for a fee, for example by retired criminal investigators or public prosecutors.
In doing so, the ELKB is responding to a request from Bavaria’s Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich (CSU), who asked the church at the beginning of February to comprehensively evaluate all personnel files, as only this could reveal further suspected cases. “Valuable time has already passed,” Eisenreich said.
At the end of January, an independent research consortium in Hanover published the so-called forum study on sexual violence in the Protestant church and diakonia. The regional churches came under criticism during the presentation of the study: the researchers accused them of not having viewed and passed on all personnel files, as originally intended in the research design, but only disciplinary files, i.e. only the “tip of the tip of the iceberg”, as the researchers said. The regional churches, especially the ELKB, again cited a lack of staff and time.
A list of 226 known cases has already been handed over to the judiciary
In the meantime, the ELKB has also handed over a list of all known cases of sexual violence since 1946 to the public prosecutor’s office in Bamberg. The list includes all 226 cases that the regional church sent to the researchers the forum study had reported, as well as other cases that were submitted to the “Recognition Commission for the Granting of Benefits in Recognition of Injustice Suffered” and all reports to the state church contact point since 2021.
There has been an agreement between the regional church and the public prosecutor’s office since May 2019, according to which the files on all cases that were handled by the church’s recognition commission must be passed on to the public prosecutor’s office. This also includes cases that become known for the first time as part of studies. The church announced that the corresponding comparison had already taken place in 2019.
According to the ELKB, the Bavarian regional church understands “sexualized violence” to be more than what the criminal code defines as crimes, for example lewd comments. The list therefore also contains many cases that are not criminally relevant or cannot be prosecuted because the perpetrator has died. But in order to create “absolute transparency”, a list of all known cases has now been handed over.