What concrete help can you provide to victims?

“The usual situation is that people come to our support centre because they have a specific need for counselling. They have had an experience that leads them to us, and the first thing we do is find out what the people have experienced, and what they may have already done afterwards. For example, many have already filed a criminal complaint, have already sought support in their social environment, but a lot of people still have a lot of questions.
Sometimes people come to us and say: I would like to find a lawyer, I really need legal advice right now. Then we support then in that, and a very important part of our support is psychosocial counselling – the conversations we have. We see again and again that it is very, very valuable for people to have a familiar and protected space where they can talk about what they’ve experienced and not have it be questioned.”

Why does this specialised facility exist?

“There are specialised support centres because right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic violence exhibit certain peculiarities, both in the way it arises and in the way it affects people and what it triggers.
We always assume that right-wing and racist violence sends a message, meaning that people are attacked, but the attack is not only against them individually. It is actually an attack against an entire group to which they belong, for example immigrants, or black people, or Jewish people. The violent act seeks to negate the group’s right of existence.
Victims then often find that the political motive for the act gets negated after the fact – their social surroundings or the media do not recognise and identify the political motive. It often happens that the offender-victim roles become reversed, meaning that people are given partial responsibility for an escalation or an attack.
We also need to take into account that racism and anti-Semitism have a structural dimension, meaning that people are subjected to it repeatedly in their everyday lives. And of course that is relevant in terms of processing experiences with violence as well.”

What is your objective?

“Our biggest motivation is when we realise that the support centre, the counselling service we have built up over the past five years, is being accepted and people use it and it helps them. I think that we are meanwhile reaching a lot of people and can provide a lot of support.”

Your work doesn’t just involve an initial legal consultation, it also provides support in dealing with the media – in what cases do victims need that kind of help?

“A lot of people who use our services find it important that their experience becomes public, so they want to talk about it so that others who aren’t affected are aware of what happened. Or they want other affected people to see or read or hear that other people have had similar experiences. When people who come to see us would like to make their experience public, then we provide support.”

Name: Olivia Sarma
Profession: Head of the response counselling centre at the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt am Main
Task: The services of the response counselling centre are directed at victims of right-wing, racist and anti-Semitic violence. At first, they can talk about their experiences. Then, they will receive help in finding legal advice, psychological support or assistance with media requests.