They live secluded behind a high fence, but they feel free. Freer than I have been in months, not in years. The house they live in doesn’t stand out among many others. Few people know who is cooking, sleeping and playing behind the security windows. Few people know that the house near Nuremberg is a women’s shelter. With fake names on the doorbell, with a video-monitored entrance door that only opens when employees unlock it. With an address that cannot be given because the residents and their children have fled. Not from war, poverty or political persecution, but from one’s own husband, one’s own father.
Annually, 13 women in Germany become victims of domestic violence by their partners every hour. Almost every day a man tries to kill his wife or ex-wife. Almost every third day someone succeeds. Every year, over 14,000 women seek protection in houses like the one near Nuremberg, and with them come more than 16,000 girls and boys. More minors than adults flee to women’s shelters. The children saw violence. They heard their mothers’ screams and cries. Were viewers of a film that they couldn’t turn off. Sometimes they even played the main role. The women’s shelter is a temporary home for them. An emergency shelter before we continue.
Yvonne Hohnhausen, 44 years old, gray hair, ice blue eyes, a rolling R when she speaks, sits on a round fabric carpet. There are five children around her. The youngest two, the oldest five. They make noise with rattles and wooden clatters and hit a xylophone with wooden sticks. Hohnhausen plays the guitar and sets the tone, the children try to sing along: “Between daring and fears, life takes its course. Step into the open, a place to breathe. With the past behind me, looking into my future, I am finally freeing myself. “
Hohnhausen is a trauma and qualified social worker, has been working in the women’s shelter for 25 years and, together with two colleagues, looks after the children who come here with their mothers. After a few songs, she puts the guitar aside. The children spread out around the room. A girl plays with dolls. A boy builds a castle out of Lego bricks. Two others push a train over wooden rails. A few rooms away, some of the mothers are cramming German vocabulary.
Four-year-old Ela* is sitting at the craft table in the playroom. She is wearing a pink dress. Her unicorn mules are in front of the door, she says proudly. She laughs loudly when she likes something. And she likes a lot. Just yesterday she squeaked happily and kissed a flower in the garden because it made her so happy that the plant had grown. Ela hardly speaks about her father. Nor about what brought her, her two older siblings and her mother here three months ago. Only at the very beginning did she once say to Yvonne Hohnhausen: “It was disgusting at home. I was always afraid. I was always hiding.”
Ela’s family comes from Afghanistan and came to Germany from Iran in 2015. The girl has three adult half-siblings who stayed with her father. Ela’s 16-year-old sister Ayla and nine-year-old brother Malik fled to the women’s shelter. Malik says his mom wasn’t allowed to leave the house. Her father forbade her to learn German. He was only on his cell phone and wasn’t interested in his children at all. “He kept screaming at us and yelling, ‘I’m going to throw you out the window and buy myself a new child.’ My sister is still so small. Small children just jump on the sofa.”
Malik stands up. Kicks in the air, slams his fists towards the ground. “That’s how he beat his older daughters,” says the boy. “I also saw him hit my mother. Although Ayla told me to take Ela and hide.” His father kicked his mother in the back several times and hit her with his fist. All because she asked him to take care of the children too. And it wasn’t the first time.
“I dream every night of my dad arguing with mom. Why is he like that?” asks Malik. Then he says quietly: “I miss my home – it was so beautiful. But I never want to go back to my father.” The muscles in his face are hard, his gaze is directed towards the ground. A boy sitting with Malik in the playroom comes up to him and hugs him. Wordless. Malik doesn’t defend himself. Here he is understood. Here he is no longer the boy with the strange family.
The children who come to the women’s shelter are traumatized. They were torn from their home. They left their friends behind. Your toy. Your normality. Some cut themselves, have eating disorders or depression. Some people have to be afraid that they will harm themselves. Still others are out of control. “They roar aggressively, destroying everything they can get their hands on like a tornado,” says Yvonne Hohnhausen. Sometimes they are no longer responsive. As if they had left their body.
Hohnhausen talks about a little girl, four years old, her “dream mouse”. Tiana was always there when her father went crazy. Also when he smashed an iron on her mother’s head. “When she arrived here, she no longer spoke. Sometimes she screamed – but silently,” says Hohnhausen. “It was pure horror in her face. There was no longer any of her little child’s soul. No joy, just fear.” What she needed was a feeling of security. Little by little she regained it in the women’s shelter. Tiana now lives with her mother in her own apartment. They no longer have contact with their father.
Loud babble of voices, children’s laughter and shouts of joy. Shortly before 3 p.m. The autumn sun beats down from the sky. After the homework lesson, the school children play with their siblings in the large garden. Some are picking apples from the trees, others are racing across the grounds on scooters at alarming speeds. The climbing frame is also busy. And on the trampoline embedded in the ground.
Some women only stay in the women’s shelter for a few days, but most stay for several weeks or months. Those responsible are putting a lot of effort into making the emergency shelter look like a home. Cozy seating areas, a green outdoor area, a full games room. Homemade hedgehogs made from dried leaves are stuck to the window panes, and in the women’s spartan rooms there are construction worker, bear or princess bed linen for the children. All of this is financed partly from donations in money and in kind, and partly from grants.
The three employees in the children’s area are paid 60 hours a week for craft afternoons, singing lessons, homework help and parenting advice. They also receive support from volunteers. This means that the house near Nuremberg is well positioned; many other locations do not have their own children’s area with trained staff. Most of the time there is no money for this.
The children are still playing and there are two new roommates in the garden. A 13-year-old and his mother, a Ukrainian. She doesn’t speak German, her son translates. He explains that he called his school and said that he could no longer come from now on because he was going to the women’s shelter. After an employee explains to him where the room is for the two of them, what the rules are and where they can shop, the boy looks at the woman and asks confidently: “Do you have any questions for me?” She laughs in surprise. “I should ask you that.” He doesn’t seem like a 13 year old. More like a man in a child’s body.
The roles are often reversed when families arrive here: there are mothers who rely on their children and children who look after and protect their mothers. Many women have never learned to assert themselves and are weakened by the physical and psychological violence they have experienced. Some don’t speak German – they were never allowed to learn it. Some people are not used to handling money. “We have to get women to take action and allow children to be children,” says Yvonne Hohnhausen.
The women’s shelter employees help with applications for no-approach and contact bans and with custody issues. There are also German lessons, and the social workers and educators practice everyday things with the women, such as riding the bus and shopping. “With our help, the children can see their mothers being independent and strong again,” says Hohnhausen. In this way the mothers would become role models again. And the sons and daughters become what they should actually be: just children.
The stories of the boys and girls are difficult to bear. For example, there is Sarina, the daughter of a former women’s shelter resident. Sarina is sitting in the lounge with her mother; she has come to tell the story. The now 16-year-old was eight when her father began beating his wife. It started with a slap in the face and ended in the most brutal violence. Sarina wiped up her unconscious mother’s blood. She didn’t want to go play anymore because she was afraid that one day her mother wouldn’t be alive when she came back.
Sarina saw her father showing her mother various bullet casings and asking, “Which one should I shoot you with?” She heard her mother answer: “With the biggest one.” “I kept begging my mom for us to escape. I didn’t understand why she was staying,” says Sarina. “It was fear,” says her mother. The fear that the father could do something to her and her daughter. “When we arrived at the women’s shelter, I said to one of the employees: ‘If it had been up to me, we would have come much earlier,'” Sarina reminds her mother. She wipes tears from her eyes and says: “I know.”
The Istanbul Convention has been in force in Germany since 2018. With the treaty, the signatory states commit to combating violence against women and girls. Experts from the Council of Europe are checking whether they do this. Your report, published in 2022, complains about serious deficits in Germany. There are still too few women’s shelter places – especially for women with many children, with an uncertain residence status or a disability and generally in rural areas.
Another point of criticism from the expert committee: women are not yet adequately protected in access and custody rights. And neither are the children. Monika Schröttle from Ravensburg-Weingarten University has been researching violence against women for 30 years, including problems with the so-called contact that separated fathers are generally allowed to have with their children. In their study published in 2008, one in ten respondents reported that physical or psychological violence had occurred during these father-child meetings. One in five of these women said that their ex-partner had attacked their children. Three percent said the partner tried to kill the children.
“The courts assume that a bully can still be a good father,” says Yvonne Hohnhausen. If the woman refuses to hand over the child to the violent partner, she could even lose her custody. “We now know that witnessing violence is just as traumatizing as if we had experienced it ourselves. It is simply not true that the man is a good father despite violence.”
The father of Malik and his little sister Ela is trying to claim access rights. Malik is afraid of the court dates where he has to repeatedly say that he doesn’t want to go to his father. “What if you misunderstand me and then I have to see him?” he asks the carers again and again. “We can’t promise him that he won’t have to see his father anymore. If the family court decides that contact will take place, he will be forced to do so by law,” says Yvonne Hohnhausen. The social worker demands that the child’s well-being should be given much more consideration in cases involving domestic violence. Many judges are not aware of these issues.
Ela and Malik’s mother found an apartment with the help of the women’s shelter. She and her children will be moving in November. Then Ela, Malik and Ayla will have their own rooms again. Plus your own kitchen and bathroom. Ela’s mother looks forward to the time full of anticipation: finally a peaceful life in safety – far away from her violent husband. Ela, on the other hand, doesn’t want to talk about the time after the women’s shelter. She will miss the garden and the other children, says her mother. Ela makes it clear: “This is my home.”
The stern foundation and the “Frauenhauskoordinationierung” are taking part in this year’s RTL donation marathon with the project “A good place for children”. The goal is to finance up to 150 educational offers for children and young people in women’s shelters. The 24-hour telethon on RTL starts on November 16th at 6 p.m. If you would like to help, please make a transfer to:
RTLDE Foundation55 370 605 905 605 605 605Keyword “women’s shelters”
More information: www.rtlwirhelfern.de
