The violent death of twelve-year-old Luise from Freudenberg has sad relevance to current statistics from the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of the Interior. According to media reports, a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old are suspected of having killed the girl (the star reported).
Overall, it is becoming increasingly common in North Rhine-Westphalia for investigators to focus on girls who are under the age of criminal responsibility. According to the Ministry of the Interior, crime statistics for the past year showed 7,299 crimes by 6,810 female suspects who were under criminal jurisdiction. In 2021 there were 2100 fewer actions. The number of suspected girls was around 2,000 lower at the time. However, the number of offenses committed by children under criminal responsibility increased immensely overall.
Both the number of crimes by children and specifically by girls was higher in 2022 than at any time since 2015. This is the result of an unpublished response from the Ministry of the Interior to a small inquiry by the AfD in the Düsseldorf state parliament. At the request of the AfD, the ministry also lists all the first names of the suspected girls from 2015 to 2022 in the paper. Even if each first name is mentioned only once, the list with 5400 entries is 33 pages long.
Incidentally, girls are in the minority when it comes to the total number of crimes committed by under-14s. In 2022, exactly 20,948 criminally underage suspects were recorded. The proportion of girls was around 32.5 percent.
