In recent months there have been increasing reports of sexual violence by state officials in Germany and internationally. The “Unbroken” initiative was founded in October to take action against this. Ivan Barker reports on their goals.

Towards the end of last year, anti-fascists from Nuremberg made patriarchal police violence public. According to the activists, during almost weekly protests against fascist demonstrations, officers repeatedly grabbed women by the neck and choked them.

At a similar time, Anna Liedtke, a German activist from the women's organization Zora, went public with her experience in Israeli captivity. She had been part of the Freedom Flotilla that attempted to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza. At a conference in Paris, Anna said in a statement that she was raped during a nude search while being transferred to a deportation prison.

The German activist Paula Maier then made public in August of this year that she was raped by a police officer while in Turkish custody. In January she was part of a solidarity delegation to Bakur (Northern Kurdistan) that drew attention to the threat to the Kurdish autonomous region of Rojava. Meanwhile, she and other activists were detained in Turkey and deported. Other participants in the delegation also reported torture during their time in detention.

Your experiences are not isolated cases. Torture and sexual violence are used internationally by states to break oppressed populations and political activists. Fighting women in particular are repeatedly targeted.

Over 400 people at the Breaking Silence Conference: “It’s not just what we’ve experienced that defines us”

Declare war on sexual violence and torture

In order to put an end to this practice, the “Unbroken – Initiative Against State Sexualized Violence & Torture” initiative was founded in October. The specific reason was the work on Paula Maier. However, its goal is to make state sexualized violence and torture visible and to combat it as a whole.

Those affected should be strengthened because they often suffer from the consequences of violence for the rest of their lives. Making your experiences public also requires great effort, as they are usually doubted and those responsible are protected.

Publicity is a central means of pushing back state sexualized violence. Social isolation, shame and fear are intended to ensure that the experience prevents those affected from resisting it even after the actual time of the crime.

The initiative therefore sees women and activists as having a responsibility to act: "We must not look away when sexual violence and torture are used as instruments of political oppression. Our solidarity must not end with words. We must support those affected, document cases, create publicity and build political pressure." Those affected should not be reduced to their experiences, but should be an active part of the work.

Paula Maier in an interview: “Sexualized violence aims to humiliate us women and silence us”

Resistance at all levels

The initiative has specifically identified several goals that it wants to achieve with its work. In addition to increasing the visibility of sexual violence and torture as a means used systematically by states, resistance to their normalization is also important. The still normal relativization, trivialization and depoliticization of the cases should be countered.

Furthermore, those responsible, i.e. perpetrators and state institutions, should be held accountable and put under pressure to act. Those affected should be supported in their struggles and demands, both politically, diplomatically and legally. For this purpose, reports should be compiled and connections uncovered.

The work should also be networked nationally and internationally. The fight should be carried out together with existing initiatives, women's organizations, human rights groups, lawyers, journalists and political actors in Germany and other countries. The forms can be press work, public events, demonstrations and other actions.

Sexual torture has a long history – and so does resistance to it

Learn from experiences

The initiative can build on a history of fighting sexual violence and torture. For example, the experiences of a campaign in Turkey that led to the conference “No to Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody Congress” in 2000. With this oneconference138 women, lawyers and victims of sexual torture gathered to share their experiences with the public. As a result, women in particular achieved a significant reduction in rape in prison for several decades.

Another example is the Basque resistance fighter Nekane Txapartegi, who was kidnapped by the Spanish paramilitary police Guardia Civil in 1999 and tortured and raped for a week. In 2007, the Spanish judiciary sentenced her to six years and nine months in prison for a confession obtained under torture in a mass trial.

She then went into hiding and fled to Switzerland, where she was arrested again in 2016. She was threatened with extradition, even though the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg had already condemned Spain several times because allegations of torture were not investigated and those responsible were not prosecuted. But Nekane made her experiences public, and through her courage, a huge outpouring of international solidarity and the pressure it put on authorities, her deportation was prevented.

These examples show that collective resistance, publicity and solidarity work. "The aim of violence is to break resistance. This aim must not succeed - and it has not succeeded," says the initiative. At the same time, there will still be a long way to go before state sexualized violence and torture are a thing of the past. With “Unbroken” another important step has already been taken.

This text appeared in print edition No. 116 from November 2026 of our newspaper. The edition is in its entiretyhereto find.

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