BUENOS AIRES ()
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
August 4, 2025
By Matthias Katsch
To make visible, to recognize, and to reappraise the causes and effects of abuse are key tasks for sexual abuse survivors.
The first step to reappraise abuse is to tell the individual truth; we must acknowledge this truth to come to terms with what happened.
It is possible to look at abuse as similar to a poisoned pond. Some step into it and are forced to take a small sip. They suffer lifelong impairments.
Thank you for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to share some experiences from the process we have been through in Germany over the last 15 years. To begin with I want to clarify my perspective on the issues at hand today:
I am a member of the current Independent Federal Commission for the Reappraisal (Aufarbeitung) of Child Sexual Abuse in Germany, set up in 2016 (content in German). I am the director of an association for victims of abuse called “The Square Table” (Eckiger Tisch (content in German).
This organization aims at representing, supporting, and accompanying those who have suffered sexual violence in childhood in the Catholic Church. As a member of the board and founder, I am also representing the organization Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), working to globally eradicate abuse in the Catholic Church.
But, above all, when I was a student, when I was between 13 and 14, I was sexually abused by two Jesuit priests at my school in Berlin, a prestigious school of the Society of Jesus, the Canisius.
Today, I mainly speak from the perspective of a victim who has begun to demand clarification of the crimes committed by priests against children and young people, and the cover-up by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Germany.
Setting up the Independent Federal Commission for the Reappraisal (Aufarbeitung) of Child Sexual Abuse in Germany was part of an effort dating back to 2010, the year of the so-called “abuse scandal,” by the surviving victims of abuse, together with the Independent Commissioner appointed by the federal government and with the support of the German federal Parliament.
It would be possible to compare child sexual abuse to a source of poison or a poisoned pond. Some step into these dirty waters and are forced to take a small sip. However, they are marked by this experience, and they suffer lifelong impairments.
Others have had to emerge from poisoned waters and drink cups full of poison. They have to make an enormous effort to move forward and survive.
Three keys
Today, I would like to present three features of our work in Germany that I believe are essential and can provide a baseline for discussion:
- The first aspect is visibility, which I consider fundamental.
- Second, I want to talk about recognition: recognition means taking responsibility for what has happened and also acknowledging the efforts victims have made and continue to make in the face of the consequences of abuse in their lives.
- Finally, I would like to briefly refer to a recurring process of educating, investigating, and searching for the reasons and causes of sexual violence against children and teenagers in our societies. This process goes through a spiral of repetition, thus allowing us to discover in each iteration new aspects and shed light on this dark underlying reality.
Why are we following these three approaches? We are doing it to bring justice to the victims—and above all, to put an end to abuse. Because abuse keeps happening. We are not investigating something foreign, something that happened in the past. It is still happening today. We have victims today.
So, we must learn from the investigation of the past in order to set up protocols and extract lessons to better protect children today. That way, we can hopefully dry up the toxic sources.
Visibility
We must start with visibility:
Making survivors visible is essential to any process of clarification and investigation. It all starts with the survivors’ voices.
Cases of child sexual abuse do not appear out of nowhere. There comes a time when victims speak out and society begins to listen and respond. Behind this are deeper changes in societies that have been going on for many decades. But we cannot go into that here.
Victims begin to speak out, but they need someone to listen.
But who is listening to them?
In many cases, at first, it is the media who listens and amplifies the message. We really have to thank the media for this! But what about the general public, the State, and society?
Listening and responding also mean that we all are learning a new language, a way to talking about these crimes that have always been present but were never actually spoken about. There was no language, no words, no knowledge.
[English Edition: An estimate of the number of victims of sexual abuse in the Church]
Yes, there are many prejudices. The most serious: that the victims themselves bear some responsibility for what has been done to them.
I insist, visibility is the first step. It is essential. Only by breaking the silence can we heal, demand accountability, and build new forms of coexistence where respect and dignity are inviolable.
Recognition
Secondly, we are talking about recognition.
A truth commission such as that in Germany must start from the recognition of the facts, of what has happened, and then seek the reasons and causes. Why there has been so much abuse in an institution and why there is so much violence in society against girls and boys, young people, and vulnerable people.
The collective experience of those who have suffered abuse should neither remain confined to the private sphere nor to statistical data. Behind every testimony there is a life, a story, a family that has been impacted.
[PHOTO: Matthias Katsch (far right) is pictured with German survivors of clergy sexual abuse during a 2022 rally. The banner they are holding reads in German: “Survivors are among the strongest people in this society!” Matthias Katsch’s social media.]
That is why we have created an independent body to investigate, listen, and document not only what happened, but also the responses—or lack thereof—of the institutions involved.
This process will allow us to understand the magnitude and the systematic nature of the abuse and promote real actions for redress, to prevent, and to offer justice.
There are other concepts, such as those in the Anglo-Saxon world with their royal commissions of inquiry, as that of Australia, which focus more on the legal aspects, able to listen to witnesses, for example, and they have the right to investigate almost like prosecutors and judges.
This is not the case in Germany.
The victims tell us their stories, what happened to them, and how they managed to move forward. We acknowledge that. And, in the testimonies of the survivors, we look for what we can learn from the past.
A fundamental issue, beyond all the systemic aspects, is why these crimes almost never came to light? Why were they kept in the dark and in silence?
We are faced with a reality where institutions have often chosen silence, denial, or the protection of their own interests over the well-being of victims. Breaking this cycle, making it visible, and demanding truth and justice, is a collective and urgent task.
But, what about the others, the bystanders? How were people convinced that these crimes did not happen? In the end, I think it was because society was unwilling to know.
To break this silence and this attitude of not wanting to know, we must convey to the victims that we now really want to know. That we will believe them! We are willing to take responsibility for helping them and doing everything possible to ensure that this does not continue to happen today or tomorrow.
As a commission, we are dedicated to all victims of childhood sexual violence. We listen to them in confidential, personal hearings. We listen to them, and we believe them. We recognize what they have achieved in their lives in order to survive. We are grateful for their willingness to share this difficult experience in order to protect future generations.
[PHOTO: “The tireless investigation of child sexual abuse!” A sculpture used by ECA during rallies in Rome in 2023. Matthias Katsch’s social media.]
But we are faced with a reality where institutions have often chosen silence, denial, or the protection of their own interests over the well-being of victims. Breaking this cycle, making it visible, and demanding truth and justice is a collective and urgent task.
To this end, we continue to gather information and analyze and process both the testimonies provided to us by the victims and the data from investigations and institutional archives.
Setting up a commission ten years ago was essential. We are convinced that this process will, on the one hand, allow us to understand the magnitude and systematic nature of the abuses and, on the other, promote real actions for reparation, prevention, and justice.
Recognition ultimately means taking responsibility. Who will provide the necessary assistance?
Those who are willing to take responsibility for paying compensation, because reparation is not possible for a life that has been violated and has marked a person’s biography. Investigation and clarification without a plan for compensation is cynical for the victims.
To reappraise
Finally, the third aspect:
I believe in a circle of reappraisal. I call it the spiral of reappraisal or Aufarbeitung in German.
Every time we go over an issue or a case again, we will find other aspects, new information, new data, and we will analyze and appraise everything again, from a different point of view, based on other facts, on other knowledge.
Sometimes you hear voices saying: enough is enough, we already know, why can’t we stop talking about it?
Our answer is this: the process of Aufarbeitung will not end until violence against the weakest and most vulnerable comes to a full stop. This violence is a crime against humanity and a constant violation of the human rights of future generations.
And every victim has the right to be heard, with recognition of both their suffering and their determination to move forward, and to be offered help.
This process will not end at a certain point—unless sexual violence against children, young people, and vulnerable individuals ends.
[PHOTO: Matthias Katsch and an Argentine survivor of clergy sexual abuse during the rally to protest Raúl Sidder’s acquittal, July 2025. Matthias Katsch’s social media.]
The collective experience of those who have suffered abuse cannot be confined to the private sphere or reduced to statistics. Behind each testimony there is a life, a story, and a family affected. Our task is to unearth these testimonies. Only then can we put an end to this history of violence and abuse.
What is reappraisal?
Like many things in Germany, the very term “reappraisal” seems to be associated with effort, with “work.” Even without linguistic or conceptual history research, it is striking how difficult it is to clearly define this term. This becomes particularly clear, for example, in the difficulty of translating “Aufarbeitung” (reappraisal) into English:
“Analysis, revision, research, reappraisal, evaluation, refurbishment, reconciliation” – these are all conceivable translations for the term “Aufarbeitung” (reappraisal). All of these meanings resonate in the term when we speak of reappraising the past: analysis, review, investigation, reappropriation, evaluation, revision, even reconciliation.
Why we in German have created a separate word, a separate technical term, for this particular type of work can be explained by looking at our recent past. We had a particular need for such a term.
Here, it will be used for the future societal approach to the widespread phenomenon of sexual violence against children and young people in families and institutions in Germany.
Five theses as a guideline for the program of the reappraisal hearing:
Reappraisal, in the proposed model, takes place in five steps:
- Speaking and listening to the truth
- Collecting, evaluating, and publishing knowledge
- Taking responsibility
- Expressing recognition, and
- Remembering and commemorating.
The starting point is the horror of the many acts. When together, they are part of a historical injustice committed against the girls and boys whom we as a society failed to protect from abuse and who were subsequently left alone to bear the consequences:
[IMAGE: Conceptual model for reappraisal or Aufarbeitung. From one of Katsch’s essays.]
The process of reappraisal takes place on several levels: first at the individual level, then at the institutional level—with the family being a special, but also an institution—and then, of course, at the societal level.
On the one hand, the individual must attend to their own history in order to drain the toxic reservoir of abuse through knowledge and understanding and to be able to move on better. Institutions must also face this, whether as a family or as a school, monastery, or association.
And finally, society must confront its tradition of turning a blind eye and its culture of silence, which has victimized so many young people in its midst for so long. The process of coming to terms with the past has a cultural dimension, as it creates a new culture of dealing with children and addressing the suffering of victims. It is therefore no small task; indeed, it is a strenuous one.
However, coming to terms with the past is not a continuous process, not a straight line into the future. Therefore, we do not know in advance how long the process will take. Coming to terms with the past does not occur linearly but in a concentric, circular movement, in a discourse, a movement centered around the acts, the horrific events that are the starting point and, time and again, the point of reference.
[PHOTO: At a sexual abuse hearing in Germany in 2020, a letterhead behind the guests displays the German message which provides the title for this piece: “Stories that matter.” Matthias Katsch’s social media.]
This horror is real. For the individual, for the institutions, for society. Which is why the most natural and common reaction to it is denial and silence. For some victims, repression is essential for survival. But institutions and society also protect themselves against it.
A taboo is set, and people perceive it more powerful the longer this silence lasts. And yet, often a single word is enough to bring this defensive building crashing down.
Therefore, the first step in the process of coming to terms with the past is speaking an individual’s truth. The horror of what happened and the desire to overcome it become the engine setting a discursive movement in motion and keeping it going.
We repeatedly go through stages and often realize that we had already postponed and addressed certain questions three or five years, or even longer ago. At the same time, as we progress in addressing the topic, new aspects emerge.
[English Edition: Seven stories of clergy sexual abuse]
This was also the case when victims of sexual violence began to speak out in 2010, and something began to happen. Suddenly, private educational institutions and, above all, the Catholic Church were identified as sites of sexual violence cover ups, and boys and men came into focus as victims.
This liberating storm did not come without warning. The process of coming to terms with the past has a decades-long history that we cannot depict here. But we owe the breakthrough of 2010 to the pioneering work of the women’s movement in the 1970s.
It would be worth examining in a separate way the reasons why, despite all previous attempts in the past, it has not been possible to focus on the issue as broadly as it has since.
Step 1: Speak the truth and listen
We begin with the first step: individual truths must be spoken, and someone must listen. This is very simple, but unfortunately, in practice, it is often extremely difficult. For both sides. It takes a long time for victims to speak. And not always is anyone even interested or willing to listen. Counteracting this is the tendency to remain silent, to cover up, to conceal, to keep the taboo.
So, it is a circular movement, but we are not going around in circles. There is progress. And we see this when we imagine this process spatially, as the upward spiral depicted in the next image:
[IMAGE: The reappraisal or Aufarbeitung spiral. From one of Katsch’s essays.]
There is progress even in this cycle of addressing a difficult topic: we are aware of the research and efforts of the past years and decades, but we are establishing new connections and can ask different, new, deeper questions. This is how we make progress.
Step 2: Gather, evaluate, and publish knowledge
The second step of our reappraisal model, our conceptual framework for addressing the issue, involves gathering, systematizing, evaluating, and publishing knowledge. This is both scientific and investigative work. In many ways, we are still at the beginning; the dark field is large.
However, there are already pioneers and experiences we can draw on. For twenty years, Ireland has been debating sexual violence in the country’s educational and childcare facilities. A milestone in this work was the investigative report by High Court Judge Sean Ryan, which was compiled over a ten-year period, and whose latest update happened as recently as 2023 and is available here.
Step 3: Assume responsibility
At this point, at the very latest, the discourse reaches the question of who actually takes responsibility for what happened. This is also an interesting term, for which the English language has two words: “responsibility,” meaning who is responsible, who cares, and “accountability,” meaning who is liable, who is willing to accept guilt and draw consequences from it. And what should this acceptance of responsibility look like? Offers of help, certainly, but what about compensation?
Step 4: Expressing recognition
Closely related to the topic of responsibility is the following fourth step in our conceptual framework: how recognition can and should be expressed for the victims and those affected by sexual violence.
Step 5: Remembering
Finally, the discourse leads to a fifth step, namely the question of how shared remembrance and commemoration of the acts and the suffering is possible.
In the heart of Dublin stands an impressive memorial to the young girls and women who passed through the homes known as the “Magdalene Laundries”: in the city’s most beautiful inner-city park stands a bench where a place is reserved forever for the exhausted who were tortured, exploited, and frequently abused in the Irish homes.
[IMAGE: Close-up image of the seat memorial to the victims of the Magdalen laundry institutions. St Stephen’s Green Park, Dublin, Ireland. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71719394]
In Germany, too, we will have to reflect on the topic of remembrance and commemoration. But this remembrance must be preceded by uncovering and clarifying, gathering information, categorizing, and scientific, social, and political classification and processing. This will not always be without controversy. Which is not a bad thing, as long as we agree on the goal: a comprehensive, systematic reappraisal in the interest of those affected.
Reappraisal requires public discourse
Finally, reappraisal does not take place in private. That would be impossible; it necessarily requires public discourse. Therefore, the Independent Commissioner’s hearing took place in a bright, light-filled space: the Berlin Academy of Arts on Pariser Platz.
In Greek tragedy, catharsis occurs on stage and on the podium: in the Berlin Academy of Arts, various interlocutors took their seats one after the other. The selection of this location for the hearing, virtually in the living room of the Republic, Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate, our national monument, made it unmistakably clear that the process of coming to terms with sexual abuse is not a marginal issue, but a core question. At the same time, it was also intended to convey the fact that some of the recognition that lies in the reappraisal, in the process of coming to terms with it, belongs to the victims.
Finally, the proximity to the Reichstag highlighted the fact that politicians must ultimately create the laws to get a reappraisal process underway. We need an independent commission that systematically and comprehensively investigates the issue!
The focus of the work of this future independent commission should be to allow for a public hearing of those affected and other experts. At the conclusion of the event, the more than 250 participants of this strenuous and intense day made a public statement by leaving the conference hall to gather on Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate around the symbol of the awareness campaign “No room for abuse”: a large white “X.”
[PHOTO: Katrin Göring-Eckardt, then-Deputy Speaker of the German Bundestag (Parliament), with Matthias Katsch in 2022. Katsch’s jacket features the white “X” symbol for the “No room for abuse” campaign. Eckiger Tisch social media.]
Bringing the issue of abuse out of the shadows and into the light…
The message was clear: There must no longer be any space, no dark corners, no isolated parallel worlds in our society where children become victims.
And this brings us full circle, namely with the answer to the question of why we should even bother undertake this kind of reappraisal.
When confronted with the experience of National Socialism, by the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno coined the very idea and word Aufarbeitung or reappraisal.
In doing so, he applied the psychoanalytic language with which he had become familiar during his exile in California. He was trying to re-evaluate the facts, the stories, and the past in order to better understand them.
There is a famous quotation by Adorno, from a piece he wrote between 1959 and 1963, “The meaning of working through the past”:
The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.
The full text is available here, in English, at a website associated to the University of Pennsylvania, among other locations.
[photo: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (right), at the Max Weber Institute of Sociology, Heidelberg, April 1964. Picture by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Wikimedia.]
* * *
Matthias Katsch wrote and read the first part of this article in Buenos Aires, on July 11, 2025, in Spanish, when attending activities organized by Argentine survivors of clergy sexual abuse there. The second half comes, at his suggestion, from his address to a German survivors’ hearing from April 30, 2013, in Berlin. That second half starts here at the section titled “What is reappraisal”. The German original of that address is available here.
The suggested citation for his source is: Katsch, Matthias (2013) “Denkfigur Aufarbeitung” – Vorgehensmodell für die gesellschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem sexuellen Missbrauch in Deutschland. Dialog Kindesmissbrauch.
A more recent research article where he and Ulrike Barth address the issue is:
Barth, Ulrike and Katsch, Matthias (2024) “Aufarbeitung muss konkret werden. Anmerkungen aus der Beobachtendenperspektive zur Herbsttagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft (DGfE)” in Erziehungswissenschaft 35 (2024) 68, S. 35-43. Available in German here.
Before his current advocacy with Eckiger Tisch, Matthias Katsch was a German MP.
Translation and editing by Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez.