Kerstin Claus, the Independent Commissioner for Issues of Child Sexual Abuse, described the latest figures regarding child abuse and youth pornography in the new police criminal statistics as “alarming”. Speaking to the media group Bayern’s newspapers, Claus stated that “the latest figures from the police criminal statistics are alarming. They show that the sexual abuse of children and adolescents remains a massive societal problem”.
She highlighted the scale of the issue: an increase of 4.7 percent, resulting in 17,126 cases, which she termed “dreadful”. A particular concern was the sharp rise in youth pornography content, which showed an increase of 19.9 percent-almost 2,000 additional cases compared to the previous year. Claus emphasized the urgent need to strengthen the protection of adolescents online, noting that in many instances involving youth who distribute pornographic content, the perpetrators are voluntary filmmakers.
Claus expressed deep concern over a potential “serious investigative gap” stating that the European Parliament’s decision to stop platforms from filtering abuse depictions risks providing even less protection to children and adolescents, rather than stopping the perpetrators.
During the press conference on the police statistics, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) also labeled the expiration of the interim ordinance as a mistake and appealed to the European Parliament to reconsider its decision.
Meanwhile, Claus urged the federal government to take further action. She stressed the immediate need for a mandatory and permanent EU-wide legal regulation within the CSA regulation to create a secure legal foundation for detecting and removing abusive material. Therefore, she appealed to the federal government and German representatives in the European Parliament to review this decision substantively. Regarding the concept of “chat control” she declared that, as it stands, it effectively accepts the suffering of thousands of children and adolescents.
