A German experiment that placed foster children with pedophiles (2021)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
At the moment, it's in a weird state. Everybody knows it, you can talk about it, but you mustn't go too far, and you mustn't ask for consequences, as many of those who where involved then in the propagation of pedophilia are still in positions of power in politics, academia and the press.
I was sent to an after school children's place that was founded with the same principles of sexual hyper-openness. While I'm not aware of any abusive actions against myself, every child knew that some of the staff were too eager to "play" and "show and tell". Others were great people to have around children, but the ideology (in these progressive circles) at the time made it far too easy for actual pedophiles to hide in plain sight, and far too hard for anyone to sound the alarm, as they'd be called a prude and excluded.
Can you name a single person in power in politics, academia and the press today in Germany that was involved in any of this? (Closest I can think of are some politicians who are past their career end and have no official position today.)
Active and complete uncovering would hurt them & their parties/platforms/organizations today, providing plenty of incentive to keep the topic out of the spot light. It's not that they can stop discussion and investigations (they're not that powerful), but it's like a criminal case: outsiders investigating can only draw a very rough picture, and will only see so much.
With today's tribal situation, people look at everything through the lens of "how will this affect my tribe?". When the people involved are no longer around and sufficient time has passed, this equation changes and shifts from "I will lose the next election if this is a major topic" to something for the historians (at least that's what I expect, but it'll take a few more decades).
For the past decade or so more and more people are starting to talk about systemic rapes and sexual assaults in the church too
Fortunately, the new "woke" current in left thought at least has gotten rid of any shred of acceptance for these kinds of "ideals", without the right's regression to homophobia and transphobia. It turns out consent is a really powerful idea in distinguishing between useful sexual liberation and predatory desires that harm others.
In 1977, a date the article mentions, the president of the Confederation of German Employers Associations was a former SS Untersturmfuehrer. The BND was founded by former SS/SDers under Gehlen. Talk about waiting years to discuss openly.
I’m not sure this is the case:
> A few days before my visit, the Berlin Senate had announced that it would commission scholars at the University of Hildesheim, who had published the preliminary report in 2020, to do a follow-up report about pedophile-run foster homes in other parts of Germany. Sandra Scheeres, the senator for education, had apologized to Marco and Sven, and the Senate offered them more than fifty thousand euros—in Germany, where compensation for damages is much lower than it is in the United States, this was seen as a significant amount.
It's horrible what happened but I also think it's wrong for people to be blamed for following standard medical practice at the time.
>Experts having total unquestioned control (and being able to veto and stop investigations)
>The state being derelict in its duty to protect children in foster care.
>In addition the psychological manipulation and neutering the kids’ sense of worth and self.
It's even worse though - the state was intentionally putting these children in foster care with pedophiles, at least at the higher level of decision-making. It's not that they didn't check, it's that the official policy was that it's ok, mostly since these kids are already too far gone for the pedophilia to matter much (a disturbing classist take in itself).
Not directly related to this case, but as part of the political climate which enables such things.
Contexually, whenever someone starts going on about Nazis and how it led to this undesirable outcome or another, I have begun to flash back to a book I read called Voluptuous Panic, which detailed the post-WWI era in Germany in terms of how crushed underfoot the Germans were, how devoid they were of men (who had largely been killed in the war) and how the country ended up in this mind-boggling debt, the economy was razed, and finally how the survivors were so desperate that their service economy often revolved around prostitution and degradation.
The section on child prostitution is just staggering because it indicates a kind of protracted development of the "tastes" of pedophiles run absolutely wild, given license to indulge. Other abhorrent things are discussed in the book, but that was really the lowest of the bunch. One of the Sin Cities series documentary also explores Berlin of that era, although through rose-tinted glasses.
In any case, it's rather easy to see that after being ground into the muck like that, the people were ready to embrace almost anyone who promised something more clean than what they had been subjected to. And of course someone comes along, they always will.
But we ended up doing something notionally similar after WWII: more grinding of the Germans (this time through division, sanctions, etc), who seem to be now indoctrinated with a spirit of self-abnegation, as if the Germans of today (the locally born sort, naturally) must offer themselves up as some kind of sacrifice to repent of the sins of previous generations. Why, to prevent fascism we must destroy ... almost everything? The nuclear family, the "oppression of children's sexuality," and so on. And so the whole thing is a perverse echo of the previous post-World War episode, wherein the sentiment is that almost everything must be unmade if only to prevent the mistakes of the past ... which hardly worked the last time around. And so academics make a lot of high-sounding noise about restructuring and sexuality and deconstructing things, nevermind Chesterson's fence.
I'm starting to see ghastly echoes of this sort of thing as "MAP" ("minor-attracted persons," supplanting pedophile on the euphemism treadmill) becomes an acronym I see more and more often here in the U.S., and the usual academics begin coming up with bloodless jargon describing their activities.
If I had to pick a new mortal sin, I would say that inculcating someone, or a group of people, with a kind of spirit of self-loathing, a wish to erase one's own existence to extirpate a grievance that did not originate with that person high on the list. Once you have done this, you can lead them into the basest acts; nothing is off the table. And so the almighty prevention of fascism, the new Highest Good, leads to this kind of behavior, approved and encouraged even by government and scholars, who will have largely retired or died by the time any kind of momentum for justice will gather.
Despite living in the US and being one of those terminally online people who spend too much time on HN and Reddit, your comment is the first time I've ever seen the term "MAP" in my life.
I don't know what academics you're talking about, and I think I probably occupy an almost disjoint bubble from them. I don't read psychology papers or wherever that kind of stuff is found.
What you're describing is disturbing and I hope it's not happening. I can't discount the possibility that I'm just out of touch with the places or communities where it is happening though.
I first saw it a year ago, in The Washington Post, with regards to an ODU professor [1] I've seen it on both Fox News and/or CNN, as well.
Recently, it was in the news because a Texas teacher was fired, "Stop calling them that. You're not allowed to label people like that. Stop it, Diego," the teacher can be heard saying in the video. "We are not going to call them that. We're going to call them MAPs. Minor Attracted Persons. So don't judge people just because they want to have sex with a 5-year-old." [2]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/24/allyn-wa... [2] https://www.insider.com/texas-teacher-faces-termination-a-vi...
You can easily search WaPo and find that the term "MAP" is used only in that article (again: about the term, and the fact that it cost someone their job), and that WaPo routinely uses the term "pedophile", quoting it only in stories where the allegations are ridiculous (like people reporting dads at playgrounds as suspected "pedophiles").
The Washington Post is a pretty powerful data point that the term "MAP" is not in fact in common use. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that it ever will be.
(So far as I can tell, the New York Times has never once used the term, either).
Apparently pedaresty was something treated on par with homosexuality those days[1]—Oscar Wilde was a pedarest, now remembered more for the "homosexuality trial". Many prominent writers, artists and such engaged in it, without much consequence. Perhaps Weimar was a bit more extreme, but the attitude seen there wasn't limited to Weimar alone. It was only much later that pedaresty was fully decoupled from homosexuality. If I remember correctly, NAMBLA was a member of the international LGBT alliance until the 1990s.
But a fringe is all it was. If you go looking for mainstream uses of the term "MAP", you're unlikely to find many. If you go looking for a movement to rename the practice of pedophilia, I'm even more confident you'll come up empty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbari_people#Traditional_pra...
(not an easy read - discretion advised)
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
It’s also kinda difficult to separate the self-loathing from being part of a dark system, from the direct affects of reparations, from becoming ground 0 at the Cold War, from knock-on effects of any of the above. But one thing is for sure, prevention of fascism was definitely not a highest good, or at least for long. We released the war criminals and rearmed them the second that an ascendant Socialist power needed to be addressed, with 0 pushback on the demands.
Who/when? War criminals released in West Germany to combat East Germany? Did they somehow not commit war crimes this time?
> the myth of the clean wehrmacht finally addressed
Can you explain this a little more? I had a grandfather I never met who was in the wehrmacht. As an American youth I understood it as wehrmacht == nazi, without any distinction. I dismissed what my grandmother said about him hating Hitler as revisionism because A. I disliked her for other reasons and B. obviously a nazi would try to prove their innocence. Being part German felt dirty as a kid and I wanted to be distanced from it.
It was not until adulthood and digging through old family records that I realized there was a potential distinction between party members and the wehrmacht, or that they were drafting all able bodied men at the end. Though my grandparents clearly weren't heroes of any sort, I realized I had perhaps been too brutal in my assessment. But perhaps not! I just don't really know.
One day I'll get around to requesting his military record from the German government, though I don't know the integrity of those records, given the post-war political situation.
Yeah West Germany successfully pushed for western-held war criminals to be released in the early 1950s. Rearmament and relaxing of the terms of reparations happened very rapidly, within a year individual pieces are being rolled back. There’s kinda a general history of rapidly needing the Germans after WW2 and a lot of people got second chances (also see Operation Paperclip). West Germany used these opportunity to try to rewrite history, gain more government independence, dramatically lessening whatever “spirit-busting” was a part of WW2 reparations.
Publication of the book basically destroyed his academic career, because he didn't come across in the book as sufficiently anti-Nazi. His writing approach was to relate his observations without judgement, and let the reader draw the implications.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Regan was criticized in 1985 for expressing similar views -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburg_controversy -- albeit in a way which was either politically clumsy or extremely offensive to the victims of Nazism, depending on your viewpoint.
To be clear, that is what parent is dog-whistling.
The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27889476 - July 2021 (26 comments)
Helmut Kentler, the psychologist mentioned in the article, was also generally considered to be part of "the left".
Is this funny to you? Or are you using some rhetorical flourish to morally grandstand? Either way, your style of retort is what I dearly hate about the present world. Maybe spend less time laughing at strangers on the internet and consuming raw propaganda; and more time education yourself on the statistics of the topic your are weaponizing.
Just a thought. Let me know if you want me to substantiate any of the points I mentioned.
https://sites.law.duq.edu/juris/2019/03/16/catholic-priest-s...
It's incompatible to compare 1 institution that is as broad and govern by different bodies of rules, regulations and laws in contrast with another institution that is whole private and is mostly run as a decentralized club.
Especially when a teacher is not arbitrary put into the position, which is why people and the media is more pissed with religious institutions rather than individual teachers.
As a Catholic, it's interesting because we (Catholics who pay attention to this drama) all know exactly where the pedophilia scandal originated from and how it happened, and we know that it was several orders of magnitude smaller than the ongoing child abuse that happens in public schools. I hate to sing this same song, but the media really does use this scandal as a headline grabbing tool because the Catholic Church is still a somewhat powerful institution in the United States. And so people imagine or invent a meme of the Church as some kind of pedo factory, when in reality you can identify a specific cohort of people who all went to Seminary at the same time for specific reasons and spread the disease.
But I recognize this could just be me succumbing to headline bias because I'm very low-info about the whole thing.