In North Rhine-Westphalia, cases of physical, emotional, and sexual violence among kindergarten children are exploding. This inevitably raises the question of what is going wrong. How can this be? Is this also related to the growing number of early sexualization programmes?
Source: report24.news, Heinz Steiner, 04 February 2026
Kindergartens and daycare centres are actually supposed to be protected spaces. Supposed to be. Yet figures from North Rhine-Westphalia show that this is obviously not the case. According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, a total of 4,718 assaults against children became known there last year – an increase of 80 percent. According to the youth welfare offices that evaluated these data, there were still 2,680 such incidents in 2024.
What is particularly shocking is that around two thirds of these acts were committed by the children among themselves. Not to mention the assaults by adults (staff). The newspaper reports:
The statistics distinguish between physical and psychological violence. In daycare centres in the Rhineland, 912 cases – more than a third of the 2,609 physical and psychological assaults – were committed by staff, while the rest were inflicted by the children on one another. “Sexual violence” is recorded separately. In this category, 98 acts by daycare employees and 329 acts by children were reported in the Rhineland last year.
This raises the question of how kindergarten children even get the idea of doing such things to one another. Could this perhaps also be linked to the early sexualization programmes that are carried out in some daycare centres?
