There are two worlds in the cosmos of SOS Children’s Villages. There is the bright, ideal world. In it, happy children laugh in colorful pictures, celebrities come to visit, and many people donate many millions of euros because the Munich-based association SOS Children’s Villages has such a good image. Thousands of employees often take great care of a large number of children who come from precarious backgrounds and cannot live with their birth parents. But apparently there is also a second world, hardly anyone knows about it. Girls and boys are said to have not gone well in it, even though they lived in a children’s village. They are said to have suffered from physical and psychological violence in the early 2000s. It was “suffered” them, admits the association and promises improvement.
How big and how dark is this unknown SOS world?
Former residents of an SOS Children’s Village in Germany raise serious allegations against two women who worked as so-called children’s village mothers. They are said to have created a climate of fear among the girls and boys entrusted to them in their children’s village families with excessive rules and punishments. There are reports of being locked in the basement or sleeping on a slatted frame without a mattress. One of the women is said to have regularly violated the children’s limits of shame. There are also indications of a failure of the child protection system: Several employees in the affected children’s village are said to have at least partially known about the methods, apparently nobody intervened.
The SOS Children’s Villages association itself published these allegations, which relate to the period between the early 2000s and around 2015, on Friday. A former resident of the children’s village reports to the SZ that he has received 10,000 euros – SOS Children’s Villages calls this “payment in recognition of the suffering”. This young man filed a criminal complaint in the summer. According to a spokesman for the responsible public prosecutor’s office, the police have been tasked with investigations.
It was formerly cared for themselves who turned to the contact point “for child welfare-endangering border crossings” in the association and talked about it. As a result, in October 2020 the SOS management commissioned the Munich social psychologist Heiner Keupp, 78, professor emeritus at Ludwig Maximilians University and a renowned expert in dealing with abuse, to carry out an investigation. His report, which was completed at the end of August, has a good 80 pages and a seven-page summary was published.
In it, Keupp outlines what former children of the Children’s Village had told him. In one family, for example, the children should not have been allowed to drink while eating; if they did, their children’s village mother grabbed them by the hair and hit their heads together. Even with minor violations of the rules, the mattress was taken away from children and they had to sleep on the slatted frame. If children did not finish eating, it happened that the leftovers were pureed and the result then had to be drunk.
Keupp writes about everyday life in the other Children’s Village family at the time: “To stir up fear was a preferred means of disciplining children.” For example, the Krampus, who took “bad children” with them, was threatened. Numerous “coercive measures” were ordered by the mother around meals. One punishment was that the children often had to sit on one of the lowest steps of the basement stairs, an increase was “being locked in the boiler room with the lights off”. Slapping and pulling the hair would have been “part of the educational repertoire”.
Gifts were withheld for birthdays and Christmas. In this family, the children’s village mother is said to have crossed the children’s limits of shame. This is said to have happened during washing and showering rituals. The former Kinderdorf child who made the complaint confirmed the allegations to the SZ. The young man has written down his memories on six pages; they are available to the SZ.
Keupp does not provide any information in his report about the frequency of the incidents. But he assumes that the penalties have been imposed regularly, he says when asked. He interviewed five people who lived in the two families at the time in question; In addition, he spoke to three other former carers and 30 other people from the association, and also evaluated the minutes of the conversation and the young man’s report.
Keupp and the association rate the respondents’ reports as credible. “The findings on the two children’s village mothers are clear,” writes Keupp. He and SOS consider the reported penalties to be dangerous to the child’s welfare. The allegations were also “admitted and confirmed” by employees at the time in the affected children’s village in talks with him, according to Keupp.
There is no further information on the two accused women in his report, nor is any statement from them. According to SZ information, both have not worked for SOS Children’s Villages for around ten years. One is said to have retired with a termination agreement, the other. According to Keupp, one of the two women could not be reached; there was a conversation with the other, but it was “not possible” to “discuss the specific events and allegations”. So far there is no representation of life in the children’s village families from the point of view of the two women. The SZ refrains from naming the children’s village in focus in order to protect the personal rights of those in care and of the women.