Dossier #6: Residency Rights for Victims of Racist Violence

Our current dossier is devoted to the campaign initiated by agOra, the Working Committee for Counseling Projects for Victims of Racist, Extreme-Right and Anti-Semitic Violence. This campaign is committed to unlimited residency rights for refugees and migrants who have become victims of racist violence. We will talk to the campaign’s initiators and take a look at individual victim counseling projects and their daily work. A case study based on ABAD’s work in Thuringia will serve to represent innumerable cases all over Germany.

Public awareness of violence and discrimination is often focused on the young, extreme-right perpetrators. Youth work in particular has concentrated very hard in the past few years on »perpetrator work« and the resocialization issues associated with it. The victims of the crimes receive far less attention, however, and so experience neither greater society’s solidarity with their plight, nor concrete support. German media plays a not insignificant part in this problem. All too often, the perpetrators even meet with approval and it is exactly this that marginalizes the victims even further and confirms the perpetrators in their actions. In an interview with D-A-S-H, the journalist Frank Jansen, of the Berliner Tagesspiegel newspaper, talks about the perception of right-wing extremism in the media. He points to the differences among published victim statistics, criticizes the »macabre victim hierarchy« in the media and challenges state-sponsored »Anti-Right Initiatives«.

After calls for an »Aufstand der Anständigen« [Uprising of the Respectable, a state-sponsored campaign against right-wing violence] in 2000 made extreme-right violence a hot discussion topic and the support of antiracist and antifascist counter-initiatives temporarily popular, the German government’s strategies for fighting right-wing extremism could be used to bring about new possibilities for working with victims of right-wing violence. For projects and associations in the East, the sponsorship of victim counseling organizations via CIVITAS became the mainstay of their support work. The continuation of this sponsorship, however, is directly dependent on the outcome of the federal elections, as the President of the Bundestag indirectly confirms in an interview with D-A-S-H.

Opferperspektive e.V. (Victim Perspective) has developed some preventative strategies against racist violence, which they present in their report, »Focusing on the Victims.« The association, which has been active in Brandenburg for four years, works on the basis of an analysis of a »perpetrator society«. The authors list the basic steps that need to be taken in order to ensure the stabilization of a democratically oriented youth culture, and hope thus to provide extreme-right-oriented, young perpetrators and their environment with a liberating alternative.

The list of victim counseling centers is not only intended for victims but also for interested people looking for opportunities to provide direct support where it is needed and wanted. In order to provide wide-spread and extensive help, the counseling centers are always on the lookout for volunteers and supporters in local communities.

Next article: The Campaign