January begins in Berlin with ice and snow for several days. And on one of these bitterly cold nights, the night before Sunday, when half of Berlin is frolicking on toboggan runs and frozen lakes and canals, a man attacks a sleeping homeless woman. He punches her in the face, kicks her and fails to steal her sleeping bag, as the police describe it in their report.
The 43-year-old woman had spent the night on the floor of the covered Alexanderplatz train station between the S and U-Bahn levels. The temperatures were around minus 6 degrees at night. The man managed to escape before police arrived. “We have a surveillance video available that we are using to investigate,” says Jan Misselwitz, spokesman for the Berlin police, to the taz.
This act stands out on several levels. It is a woman who was attacked by a man, she has no fixed address; Added to this is the extreme cold that has prevailed in Berlin since the beginning of January. After the police press release was published, he reported Daily Mirror the case. This is also special because: “Only a few cases of violence against homeless people make it into the press,” as Paul Neupert from the Federal Working Group on Homeless Assistance explains to the taz.
At the end of January 2024, the Berlin Senate recorded 55,656 homeless people in Berlin. Of these, he counts 6,032 homeless people. According to the homeless report from the Society for Innovative Social Research and Social Planning (GISS), the number of homeless people in 2024 will be 6,032. In addition to homeless people, the GISS also calculates the number of hidden homeless people. This includes people who are only temporarily staying with friends. This means an insecure living situation that creates relationships of dependency. The insecure housing situation also makes it difficult to participate in education, political participation, employment and social life. In 2024, 2,364 homeless people were covertly recorded in Berlin.
Such acts of violence are not uncommon. In 2024, police recorded 498 cases of violence against homeless people. But Neupert has doubts about the number: “The police define the term homeless very narrowly, but how exactly they define it is not clear,” he says. Basically, anyone who does not have their own rental agreement is considered homeless, and anyone who really has no place to sleep and spends the night on the street, in parks or in emergency accommodation is considered homeless.
According to Neupert, the actual number of attacks is likely to be higher than the official figures. But regardless of this, according to the police, acts of violence are increasing: “In terms of the number of victims of homeless people, an increase of almost 20 percent is expected in 2025,” the police announce.
These are embassy crimes. The homeless should be told: you are not wanted here. This can happen to you too
Merle Stöver
The Federal Working Group for Homeless Assistance gives further reasons why it assumes that there is a larger number of unreported cases. For example, homeless people belong to the group that reports the fewest crimes. Neupert explains: “One of the reasons for this is that homeless people are afraid of becoming victims of violence again because of a complaint.” In addition, many homeless people experience displacement by uniformed people, which reduces their trust in them.
But what is behind the violence against homeless people? Merle Stöver is researching this. She studied social work and is now investigating this question as part of her dissertation at Bielefeld University. “It is important that we understand violence against homeless people as hate crime,” she says. It is often not an attack against the individual person, but against homeless people as a whole, says Stöver. “These are embassy crimes. The homeless should be told that you are not wanted here. This can happen to you too,” she says. In this way, the perpetrators would create spaces of fear.
Stöver read 100 criminal case files. “In 98 percent of cases, the perpetrators are men and are usually between the ages of 15 and 30“, says the violence researcher. Many are in a very precarious economic situation. “The perpetrators themselves are not that far removed from the homelessness that they are confronted with by homeless people,” explains Stöver. They often act out of fear or panic that they will not survive in the capitalist system and become homeless themselves. “Attacks on homeless people or on aid institutions, such as the cold bus, indicate an attempt to drive out these fears,” explains Stöver.
Because this is also one of the frightening events of this young year in Berlin: Shortly before and shortly after New Year’s Eve, a man presumably has all three in succession Refrigeration bus of the Berlin City Mission was set on fire. According to current information, the suspect is himself homeless. Volunteers travel through Berlin at night on buses to provide care or support for homeless people.
It is a pattern that Stöver also observes in her research. She explains that in more than half of the cases, violence against homeless people comes from people who are themselves homeless or homeless. “This is due to the fierce competition for places to sleep or beg, for example,” she says.
According to violence researcher Merle Stöver, there is only one thing that can help prevent acts of violence against homeless people: “People are attacked because they are on the street and cannot retreat,” she says. “That’s why we need an unconditional right to housing.”