Germany's secret paedophilia experiment

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Starting in 1969, Berlin welfare authorities handed over the care of at least three homeless teenagers to Dr Helmut Kentler, a sex researcher from Hanover. He placed the youths with known paedophiles, including one who already had a criminal record for child abuse, believing that it would give troubled teens a social anchor while giving the paedophiles a chance to become caring foster parents. [...]

In most cases the paedophiles were asked to care for 13-, 14- and 15-year-old drug addicts and prostitutes, of which there were about 1,000 in 1970s West Berlin. But how many children precisely were placed with paedophiles, what ages were they and how much did the city pay the paedophiles? "We don't know," Nentwig [University of Göttingen] said at the launch of her report, explaining that city archivists blocked access to crucial data, claiming variously that files were missing, unsorted or sealed for data-protection reasons."We would have wished for more co-operation in clearing this up," the researcher said. [...]

Germany's paedophile past reared its head again in 2013 when links emerged between founding members of the Green Party and West Germany's Paedophile Movement, which rode the coat-tails of gay-rights groups and lobbied for the decriminalisation of consensual sex between adults and children. [...] In 1981 Jürgen Trittin, today a senior Green MP and then a young party official in Göttingen, signed off on a party pamphlet seeking the decriminalisation of paedophilia. The party commissioned a study into the full extent of Green-paedophilia links. Published a week before the 2013 federal election, it cost the party countless votes and prompted a grovelling apology from Trittin. He argued that the paedophile links had to be seen in the context of the sexual revolution of the 1970s, which encouraged a "fiction that there could be sexual relations between adults and children beyond violence or abuse of trust".

source: Article 'Germany's secret paedophilia experiment' by Derek Scally; www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/germany-s-secret-paedophilia-experiment-1.2897942; The Irish Times; 10 December 2016