The Bavarian Justice Minister Georg Eisenreich (CSU) has called on the Protestant regional church to comprehensively deal with sexual violence in church spaces. The authors of the ForuM study made it clear during their presentation last week “that a comprehensive evaluation of personnel files instead of just disciplinary files can reveal further suspected cases,” Eisenreich told the Evangelical Press Service on Friday: “I therefore call on the regional church to to get this started. Valuable time has already passed.”
An independent, interdisciplinary research team presented the study on Thursday last week. A sub-project of the study collected key figures on the frequency of abuse in the 20 Protestant regional churches and 17 regional Diakonie associations. The researchers found 2,225 affected people and 1,259 accused people in the data available to them, but assume a much higher number of cases due to the limited data available.
They criticized the regional churches, which, instead of the originally contractually agreed random review of personnel files, had ultimately only provided data from disciplinary files and already known cases, with the exception of one.