Malevolent Protectiveness
Ruchlose Sorge [Malevolent Protectiveness], from Anti-Moralia: Sexualpolitische Kommentare [Anti-Moralia: Sexual-Political Commentaries], by Volkmar Sigusch, Frankfurt/New York, Campus Verlag, 1990, pp. 9-11.
Volkmar Sigusch (born June 11, 1940) is a German sexologist, physician and sociologist who earned his MD and PhD at the University of Hamburg. From 1973 to 2006 he was director of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft [Institute for Sexual Science] at the clinic of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He wrote over 500 scientific articles and more than 30 books.
Among us lives a man who is literally being tormented to death -- in the name of justice, but in truth due to hysterical nonsense and hypocrisy. I've known about this for a year now, and initially had faith in the Federal Constitutional Court, and then in the Premier of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is called "Brother Johannes." This led me to believe that he knows something about mercy. Meanwhile the appeals process continues along, and Johannes Rau has more urgent matters to attend to.
A mountain of paper lay before me -- petitions, decisions, depositions, reports -- in which the man's life is discussed. Alexander Ebbinghaus, Münster Justice Court, 81 years old, probably the oldest person in the German penal system, a "charity case;" as his lawyer, Klaus Bower, says: ''His days are numbered."
What detestable things has this man done? The Nazis held him in prison and at hard labor for four long years. The came our Republic, which has (as of now) deprived him of a further twenty years of freedom. And for some years now our legal system has employed so-called preventive detention, which had originally been adopted by the Nazis. Yes, you read it right: Alexander Ebbinghaus has, as of now, served a total of 24 years of drudgery and imprisonment.
His crime? According to documents, as recently as 1973, he loved under-age boys, and was loved by them. But still more terrible: He admitted to it. This has obviously gotten the jurists' vilest, basest impulses flowing. They have torn the guiding principle of the "criminal law" to shreds, and it is still merely the confession, the character, against which sentence has been passed, pedophilia in and of itself, as it were. The decision of the Highlands Court of June 1983, which dealt with "exposure to the imposition of preventive detention," put it this way: "The institutional physician has concluded that his poor state of health (three previous illnesses and an operation were mentioned) made it impossible for him to even be able to commit any future crimes ... the offender's scope of action (is) limited by age and illnesses.. .he is no longer (able to) engage in sexual activity."
However the Court will not let the endless torment of "detention" out of its clutches. Because, as it "argues" in this same ruling, he "as yet" has no sense of wrongfulness, with there being no fundamental change in terms of his perverted attitude over the course of the imposition of the punishments as well as the preventive detention; the offender has "a one-track mind and is irreversibly fixated on pederasty." His friends, of which there are ten, who – as the Court had previously requested – would "control" him and intended to look after him around the clock, could, "to this extent", be disregarded because they must have proceeded '''based on a different inner attitude.. .with regard to the dangerousness of his disposition." What is being prosecuted, therefore, is not a feared sexual act, but rather, simply a "perverted attitude": a" thought crime."
In their profligate uneasiness, the judges here have given voice to a generalized scandal which, now as ever, pedophilia represents. Moreover the offender is unable to die while free, because his "neighborhood is comprised of single-family houses occupied by young families." Single-family housing developments and one-track-minded pedophilia without physical/sexual activity and without the lip service of the spellbound offender: "Right, I am a perverted pig" – this is, in fact, contradictory. The real boy-rapist is not the one under lock and key, but rather the abstract scandal of imagined pedophilia in neighborhoods with latch-key children, that with abuse and attention and spells and shame, the truth of pedophilia will be unleashed: the love of children. Peter Schult, who finally brought the justice system to its senses, and Alexander Ebbinghaus, who also attached to their fetish no "heart for the children," subsequently had these insights torn from them. As for the parents, they take the possibility that someone may love their children so seriously that they are installing a new color TV monitoring system.
Every court has attested o the fact that Alexamder Ebbinghaus does not employ violence. and that the boys have not been psychologically harmed. Therefore, this is a case pf true pedophilia. One of his "victims" frankly offered all of us a lesson: "For the very first time, I had the feeling that someone was looking at me as a person. ... He accepted me as a person and did not treat me like a dumb little kid ... With him I found the love I'd been missing... Anyhow, the sexual contacts between us were mutually desired. It was not at all a case of my weakness and defenselessness being taken advantage of, for I wanted to satisfy my sexuality... Alexander was sentenced to six years in prison. At the time (just like today), I was unable to see how this verdict made any sense, because I had experienced the relationship as being extremely positive and valuable to me. To that extent, I experienced the forced breakup of the relationship as a form of violence; both against Alexander as well as me personally."
An old man remians behind bars as a danger to the public because, though it is true he would no longer be able to love children, he obviously would still be clearly disposed to commit these crimes; and so, following endless investigations into his physician-attested heart rhythm disorder and other illnesses, Alexander Ebbinghaus is declared unfit to stand trial. Pedophilia is addressed with decades-long deprivations of freedom, even unto death, an a clergyman blesses the atom bomb (which they called "Little Boy") that was detonated over Hiroshima. What kind of world is this?
However, I would rather send my son to a child-lover than to those housing development families. Of course, the judges would also suspect my inner attitudes, and would disregard it. It would seem that in this world one must kill people in order to show understanding, and not be bothered by it at all.