For years, German politicians and the media ignored the warning signals coming from Great Britain, where a decade ago the existence of organized criminal groups exploiting minors was already exposed. Fear of accusations of racism and of stigmatizing any national groups led to the self-censorship of public opinion.
The world first heard about grooming gangs only in 2015, when the British media revealed the scandal in Rotherham, where gangs of Pakistani men had for years sexually abused hundreds of British girls with impunity. Even though the victims reported the crimes, the local authorities, the media and the police ignored these reports.
Nearly 11 years after the reports from Rotherham, the German city of Nuremberg has come into the spotlight. A special police unit has just broken up a gang of young men from Pakistan who, in the area around the railway station, drugged and raped young women and girls. The recordings that were found suggest that the violence was filmed and sold on the darknet.
According to the police report, the gang had been operating for at least two years, and its members were recruited mainly from among immigrants from Pakistan. The victims were drugged and then raped in abandoned buildings near the railway station. Some of the recordings made their way onto the internet, where they were sold for thousands of euros.
Further accounts come from Stuttgart, the capital of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, where a young woman was raped in the very center of the city inside a public toilet. The perpetrators, often young men of South Asian or Middle Eastern origin, operate in groups, attacking women in parks, on the streets and on public transport. The police admit that they are having difficulty identifying the perpetrators, and the victims are often afraid to report the crimes.
Experts are sounding the alarm: suppressing information about crime produces the opposite of the intended effect. Citizens lose their trust in the state, and criminals feel they can act with impunity.
Prof. Dr. Jurgen Schmidt of the University of Munich, a security expert, warns: "If we do not start speaking plainly about the problems connected with immigration and crime, we will lose control of the situation. Silence only deepens the crisis."
The exposure of the activities of grooming gangs in Germany triggered a wave of outrage in German society. On social media, voices are appearing that demand harsher penalties for the perpetrators and greater transparency from the authorities. At the same time, some politicians warn against fueling anti-immigrant sentiment.
