Eike Stedefeldt conducted an interview on the ideological crux of a Charité project for potential “perpetrators” against children
Translated by JUMIMA
Original German text
On International Children’s Day, June 1, the Volkswagen Foundation presented a research project led by Prof. Dr. Klaus M. Beier and was funded by it. It was called “Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse in the Dark Field” and located at the Institute for Sexology and Sexual Medicine at the Berlin Charité. After all, some of the “potential perpetrators” who “express sexual fantasies directed at children” have “awareness of the problem and want therapeutic help”. - Kurt Hartmann from the Association for Fictional and Scientific Pedophila Literature [Belletristische und wissenschaftliche Pädoliteratur e.V.] was also there and somewhat thwarted the concept. Eike Stedefeldt asked him about his impressions:
To take up the advertising campaign belonging to the project: Do you love children more than you would like to? I like children and have always had a good relationships with them. But they are not sexually attractive to me.
Then what drove you to go this press conference? As a boy, I had a sexual relationship that was very important to my gay development with a man whom I later learned was a pederast. For this reason, I have long been annoyed by the undemocratic criminal law on sexual relationships, which denies boys, like me, the right to have a sexual relationship with older people. Therefore, I wanted to publicly register an objection with Professor Beier and CDU General Secretary Siegfried Kauder, who is part of the project advisory board for the crime victim assistance “Weißer Ring”.
What exactly did you want to object to? On the one hand, I wanted to criticize that clients are supposed be treated for sexual abstinence, instead of allowing them to develop pedophile relationships for mutual benefit. On the other hand, I wanted to attack the violation of Article 2 of the Grundgesetz [German constitution] – free development of personality – by paragraph 176 SCC – sexual abuse of children.
You can have very different opinions on both, depending on the perspective from which you look at it. How did the people you addressed respond? Professor Beier preferred not to answer me at all and instead whispered to his colleague Hartmut Bosinski from Kiel, who is also on the advisory board. Apparently I had touched on a taboo, because in Beier’s logic, every adult sexual attraction for prepubertal age is a disorder or illness and therefore not part of free personal development.
In 2002, the lawyer Siegfried Kauder pushed the coalition in the Bundestag to promote child sexual abuse as a crime, which means a minimum sentence of one year. Now he is considered the hottest candidate for the position of chancellor in a Merkel government. It might be of interest whether and what he answered. He declared that he did not want to abolish §176 and that I was the only one who thought it was unconstitutional. Then he announced that he would intervene early on in the run-up to sexual crimes via the Internet, since there is currently a petition on it in the Bundestag. I suspect it is about tracking sexual “grooming” of children in chat portals using agents provocateurs. It is a great lawyer who wants to provoke crimes that would otherwise not happen!
As a somewhat distant viewer one often has the impression that relationships that are wanted and perceived as pleasant by children, despite all ambivalence, violate the current ideology and are therefore pushed away, censored away or even lied away. That doesn’t sound very scientific. Starting around the mid-1980s, starting from the United States, we have increasingly observed a discourse only about abuse. Even the sexology institutes established in Germany have jumped on this train in part, and in part they remain silent. A culpable neglect that does not do justice to the complexity of the topic. There is hardly any open research in this area. It is even being combated in a downright repressive manner.
Even Beier’s project, which looks comparatively liberal, remains in the victim-perpetrator scheme. Was that problematic at the press conference or was there consensus among journalists who can be so critical on other things? Unfortunately, journalists' question proved to be less critical. That was expectable. Most of them probably lack any background knowledge. That is why the abuse paradigm and the victim-perpetrator scheme are no longer called into question. For example, Professor Beier regularly talks about sexual assaults that he wants to prevent without taking into account that sex can also be fun – even a child.
In times of documentary and infotainment, journalism has long tended to become an incestuous mass orgy, whose participants always use their own information, however dubious and prejudiced, as a credible basis for further features. But maybe one of the guests at the press conference was woken up by your questions … Yes, sure! Some probably understood. Next to me was a young man from dpa [German news agency] who spontaneously asked me for an interview after I had outed myself as an ex-boyfriend. At the end of the press conference, at least as many colleagues gathered around me as there were around the professors. A television team from VOX and even the one from Ms. Uli Hesse from Bayerischer Rundfunk interviewed me extensively.
And, were there any reactions to the broadcast? So far I don’t know of any broadcast. Since they have all written down my address and telephone number three weeks ago for further inquiries, I haven’t heard from them.
Do you think the tapes might have ended up in the poison cupboard? That’s what poison cupboards are for, isn’t it?
Correction by the editorial staff:
The confusion of two CDU members of the Bundestag only became apparent to the editors after the article appeared. The interviewer Eike Stedefeldt hereby state to their exoneration and that of Kurt Hartmann, whom he interviewed: Both MPs come from Baden-Württemberg – one from Bad Dürrheim, the other from Tuttlingen, 15 kilometers away. Even in terms of religious belief (Protestant), age (born in 1950 and 1949) and optics (from hairstyle to glasses to necklaces) they are close together. Both are also lawyers and right-wing hardliners. And yet Siegfried and Volker Kauder are not the same. Neither is the former the well-known CDU general secretary for whom Kurt Hartmann thought he was, nor is the latter a member of the White Ring. But: the Misters Kauder are brothers and again won their constituencies on September 18, 2005. – Which could be far more serious than their confusion.