Content area
Full text
Translated by Nicholas Levis
Controversies about pedophilia continue to unfold in many countries. In no small measure, this is due to the coming to light in recent years of many incidents of abuse involving the Catholic Church. These scandals have posed a serious challenge for the Church and have been treated in various national case studies.
The ongoing public debate on pedophilia in Germany, however, has been cast as a problem of the Left and of liberalism, almost certainly making for a unique circumstance internationally (Herzog 2014). To understand how this happened, we must take a closer look at the German discourse since 2010, which has gone through different waves and displayed a variety of discursive elements. The narrative that has been reinforced since 2013, especially, portrays the Left and liberalism as particularly apt to adopt pedophiliac positions.
Though the waves of public debate have been complex, since 2013 there has been an almost complete failure to distinguish between actual practices of sexual abuse and the adoption of pedophilia-defending positions in the debates about sex crime laws during the 1970s and 1980s. These controversies are deeply embedded in the specificities of German history. They return us to the 1960s and 1970s, the sexual revolution, and the post-1968 antiauthoritarian education and childrens Kinderladen (day care) movements in West Germany-and thus also to the "paradoxes of sexual liberalization" that still concern us today (Herzog 2013). From the perspective of historical scholarship and a history of education that considers the longer term, even more fundamental questions arise about how very differently child sexuality and the relationships between adult and child sexualities have been discussed and assessed at various points over the centuries (König2014).
Stages of the German Debate Since 2010
Starting in early 2010, the German public learned of numerous incidents of sexual abuse at Catholic boarding schools in prior decades. This served to revive interest in another earlier scandal involving the sexual abuse of children and adolescents at the Odenwald School, an institution famous within the educational reform movement. Odenwald had been founded in 1910 as a pioneering coeducational boarding school closely associated with the life reform (Lebensreform) and youth and womens movements of that time. In the 1970s, Odenwald became a model for a new West...