Bound to Silence (PDF)

"I had the misfortune of not growing up in an ideal children's village family. It is very important to me that my experiences are made public so that what has happened is acknowledged, because in the past no one believed it and nobody did anything about it."

This book deals with the violence, abuse and injury experienced by children and young people in facilities run by SOS Children's Villages Austria. Horst Schreiber analyses the structural factors in the history of this organisation which made repression and violence possible. The care concept which was introduced when the organisation was founded reproduced a family situation with the traditional gender hierarchy. The village director represented paternal order and sanctioning powers, the SOS mothers with their motherly care had to provide a healing power for the abandoned child.
Even if the out-of-home care in SOS Children's Villages differed in a positive sense from that in a home or foster family, it nevertheless appears that numerous children found they had "fallen out of the nest" a second time. In the case of sexual violence against children and young people, for a long time SOS Children's Villages was at pains to keep this secret in order to protect its good reputation. Many signs of abuse were systematically ignored.


Read more: http://www.erinnern.at/bundeslaender/tirol/unterrichtsmaterial/dem-schweigen-verpflichtet.-erfahrungen-mit-sos-kinderdorf