Sexual violence is rising. Can Germany talk honestly about why?

The country is edging towards acknowledging uncomfortable truths about sexual violence — but stops short of drawing the conclusions that follow.

Dear Reader,

It is well known that Germany only criminalised rape within marriage in the late 1990s. Until then, the Bundestag was of the opinion that a husband could not force his wife to have sex — that consent, once given at the altar, extended indefinitely.

Less well known is that until 1995, German courts did not classify so-called “honour killings” as murder. Men, mainly Anatolian migrants, who killed female relatives for transgressing against Muslim values were routinely convicted of manslaughter and received comparatively lenient sentences. The courts showed explicit understanding for the cultural motives behind the crimes.

On paper, Germany has come a long way since then. Whether it has done so in practice is another question. What has changed is not necessarily the instinct to excuse — but who is doing the excusing.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz was famously one of a small group of backbench rebels who opposed redefining rape to include sexual violence inside a marriage. He has since said that he would vote differently now.

The issue of sexual violence resurfaced recently in the debate over deepfake pornography. The issue gained traction after actress Collien Fernandes accused her former partner Christian Ulmen of distributing manipulated sexual images in her likeness. Once again, German law lags behind European standards. The distribution of deepfakes still isn’t considered a sexual crime, merely a case of copyright violation.

For critics, Merz’ reaction to Fernandes’s allegations shows that a leopard doesn’t change its spots. Asked by a Green MP why he hadn’t spoken out in the wake of Fernandes’ allegations, he defended his record on supporting victims of sexual violence before appearing to deflect to the issue of migrant crime, stating that “a significant portion of this violence stems from immigrant groups.”

For left-wing opponents, this was the latest evidence of Merz’s tactic of scapegoating migrants for broader social problems. Back in the autumn, Merz told a journalist to “ask his daughter” what the chancellor might be talking about when he had referred vaguely to migrants causing problems in German inner cities. That comment led to the creation of a protest movement called “daughters against Merz”, which called on women to take to the streets to fight against the chancellor’s “racist rhetoric.”

But two things can be true at once. It may be that Merz has been too slow to react to the rising issue of AI-generated deepfakes. But it is also true that parts of modern feminism show a similar reluctance to confront crimes when they are tied to cultural background. The trivialisation — and willingness to excuse perpetrators based on cultural background — that was common in courts up until 1995 is now common among progressive activists.

This week, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) published its annual crime statistics, showing a 72 per cent increase in reported serious sexual offences since 2018, with around 14,500 cases recorded in 2025. Once again, non-German nationals were significantly overrepresented among suspects: roughly four in ten, compared to around 15 per cent of the population.

Among some nationalities, the disparity is particularly stark. Syrian and Afghan nationals, for example, were suspected of rape and sexual assault at almost ten times the rate of German citizens.

For many on the political left, however, these figures are themselves taken as evidence of systemic bias. If Syrians are suspected of crimes so much more often than Germans, then, they argue, this reflects discriminatory policing rather than underlying patterns. “Based on shaky police data, migration is declared the main problem every year instead of conducting a nuanced analysis of its causes,” said Green MP Irene Mihalic.

In extreme cases, this reflex to blame systemic racism leads to perpetrators being protected. After the mass assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015–16, prominent left-wing voices sought to shift the debate to the police’s use of the acronym “NAFRI” (“Nordafrikanischer Intensivtäter”), citing it as evidence of racial profiling.

In another case, a politician from Die Linke who had been gang raped in a playground initially told police that some of the perpetrators were German. She later admitted the claim was false, explaining that she feared the crime would be used to fuel racist stereotypes.

Last month, it emerged that a youth centre and — extraordinarily — the local welfare office in Berlin’s Neukölln district suppressed repeated complaints of rape and sexual assault involving Arabic youths. Again, their reasoning was that they did not want the crimes to be used by the far-right to propagate anti-Muslim stereotypes.

For several years after the influx of refugees in 2015, it was taboo to address the link in crime figures between migrants and violent and sexual crime. Major liberal media outlets dismissed attempts to do so as populist race-baiting.

But Merz is far from the only one to have brought the discussion into the centre of public debate.

Publications such as Der Spiegel have started to acknowledge that the background of perpetrators may be relevant. An article published this week by the influential magazine chided the left for still refusing to acknowledge that misogyny brought from abroad was contributing to rising levels of rape. “Only by identifying a problem can we find solutions to it,” the article argued, although it conspicuously failed to name a single concrete solution.

This is where the debate now stands. Germany is edging towards a point where the problem can be named. But the journey remains a nervous one, often bookended by obligatory disclaimers about not supporting the demands of the AfD, always accompanied by heated reactions around “serving racist narratives.”

Discussing viable solutions still seems a step too far.

That people are so reluctant to name solutions is hardly surprising. Once culture is admitted as a factor in criminal behaviour, the implications extend far beyond policing. It raises questions about the viability of multiculturalism as the basis for a modern society.