Falken Richter | RechtsErmittlung.de | May 2026

The Numbers Germany Won't Publish

What the European Parliament has been asking Berlin for over a decade — and what the silence tells us

Long-form investigation · 18 min read

There is a sentence buried in a European Parliament resolution from 29 November 2018 that should have ended careers, prompted ministerial inquiries, and rewritten the German family­law debate. It didn't. Most Germans have never read it. Most German politicians hope you never will.

Here it is, in the EP's own words:

"[The European Parliament criticises] the lack of statistics on the number of cases in Germany where court rulings did not comply with the recommendations of the Jugendamt and on the outcomes of family disputes involving children of binational couples, despite the repeated requests over many years for such data to be collected and made publicly available."

— European Parliament Resolution of 29 November 2018 on the role of the German Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt) in cross-border family disputes (2018/2856(RSP))

Read it again. Slowly.

The European Parliament — not a fathers' rights group, not a tabloid, not a manosphere podcast — has officially stated that Germany has refused for more than a decade to publish two specific data points:

1. How often German family courts follow the Jugendamt's recommendation.
2. The outcomes of custody cases involving binational couples — i.e. whether non-German parents are systematically losing.

These aren't obscure technical statistics. They are the two numbers that would either prove or disprove the central allegations against the German family-law system. The two numbers that would settle the debate. The two numbers that, in any other Western democracy, would be published in a routine annual report.

Germany has been asked. Germany has not answered.

This article is about why that silence matters, what it almost certainly hides, and what every German citizen — and every politician seeking re-election — should be required to explain.

What we know without the missing data

Before we get to the silence, let's lay out what can be established from publicly available sources.

On paper, German custody law looks egalitarian. In divorces involving children, joint legal custody continues automatically in 93–96% of cases. The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) publishes this number annually and it gets cited as evidence that German fathers and mothers are treated equally.

In practice, the picture collapses. When you ask a different question — not "who has joint legal custody on paper" but "who actually lives with their children" — the German Family Panel (pairfam) finds that fewer than 5 percent of separated families practice the Wechselmodell (shared physical custody). The Allensbach Institute's 2017 survey came to a similar conclusion: about 7 percent.

Compare to Sweden, where roughly 30 to 50 percent of separated families share physical custody. To Belgium, where shared custody became the legal default in 2006 and now sits above 30 percent. To the Netherlands, around 25 percent.

Germany is at the bottom of Western Europe.

Where contested cases reach a sole-custody decision, fathers receive sole custody between 6 and 10 percent of the time — depending on year and Bundesland. In 2018, of 1,016 court-ordered sole-custody transfers, 914 went to mothers and 102 went to fathers. In Bavaria in 2009, 76 percent of contested decisions went to the mother; in Brandenburg, only 47 percent. The same federal law produces dramatically different outcomes depending on the cultural disposition of the local judiciary — which alone should trouble anyone who believes in equal treatment under law.

But these are the numbers Germany does publish. The damage is mostly in what it doesn't.

The first missing number: how often judges rubber-stamp the Jugendamt

Here is how a contested German custody case actually works.

The case is filed. The family court is required by law (§ 162 FamFG) to involve the Jugendamt — the local Youth Welfare Office, run by the municipality. A social worker visits the parents, sometimes the child, and writes a Stellungnahme — a formal recommendation to the court. The recommendation is, in theory, advisory only. Not binding.

In practice, the European Parliament described its weight in three precise words:

"[The Jugendamt] delivers a recommendation to the judges, the nature of which is practically binding."

"Practically binding." That phrase did not come from a fathers' rights pamphlet. It came from the European Parliament, voted on and adopted by Members of the European Parliament from 27 member states.

German practitioners confirm the pattern. The country guide produced by Legal500 — a reference work used by international family lawyers — states matter-of-factly: "Often, the court would follow the recommendation of the youth welfare office." German family lawyers writing for English-language audiences put it more bluntly: judges follow the Jugendamt almost always.

How often, exactly?

That is the first missing number. There is no published statistic. None. Practitioner estimates range from 70 percent to 95 percent. Nobody knows because nobody is required to count.

Think about what this means.

The Jugendamt social worker — a municipal employee, with no judicial training, with broad discretion, accountable to no court — writes the recommendation. The judge reads it under heavy caseload pressure. The judge issues a ruling. The ruling appears on the public record as a judicial decision. Any bias in the recommendation becomes invisible inside what looks like a judicial decision. The structural pattern is buried two layers deep.

If the rate at which judges follow Jugendamt recommendations were 50 percent, that would suggest meaningful judicial scrutiny. If it were 90 percent, it would suggest the Jugendamt is effectively the decision-maker and the family court is a notary's office. We don't know which it is. Germany has been asked, by the European Parliament, repeatedly, for over ten years, to find out.

It hasn't.

The second missing number: what happens to foreign fathers and mothers

The European Parliament's Petitions Committee began receiving complaints from non-German parents over fifteen years ago. By 2018 the volume was sufficient to prompt a full plenary resolution. The petitioners — French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Belgian, Spanish — described a remarkably consistent pattern:

• The Jugendamt preferred to keep children with the German parent, regardless of which parent that happened to be
• During supervised parental visits, foreign parents who tried to speak their own language with their bilingual children had visits cancelled or contact suspended (the EP specifically condemned this practice)
• Foreign court orders from other EU member states were not recognised when they conflicted with the Jugendamt's preference, in apparent violation of Brussels IIa
• Foreign parents living abroad were sometimes not contacted at all before recommendations were made
• Documents were sent in German with response deadlines too short to permit translation and proper response

The Petitions Committee acknowledged it had only the petitioners' own accounts and could not verify each case independently. So in 2018 the European Parliament asked the obvious question: can we please see the actual outcome data, broken down by parent nationality, so we can determine whether this pattern is real?

That data does not exist.

Or, more precisely: it has not been published, and Germany has not collected it in a form that would permit publication. After more than a decade of formal requests by an EU institution, the answer remains: we do not measure the question you are asking.

This is the most damning fact in this entire dossier.

A democratic state, asked by the legislature of the European Union to produce data that would either vindicate it or expose it, has answered with silence. For ten years and counting.

What conclusion should a reasonable citizen draw?

Why this matters more than any individual case

You can dismiss any individual father's grievance as the bitter narrative of someone who lost in court. You can dismiss VafK or MANNdat or FSI-EV as activist organisations with an axe to grind. You can dismiss the foreign parents petitioning Brussels as people who simply lost legitimately and went looking for someone else to blame.

You cannot dismiss the European Parliament.

You cannot dismiss the question of why the German government does not collect the data that would settle the dispute.

Because the absence of data is not neutral. In a state that prides itself on Gründlichkeit, on bureaucratic precision, on Statistik-Kultur, the failure to track a specific dimension of an officially-recognised dispute is itself a decision. A government that wanted to know would know. A government that does not know has chosen not to know.

There is one rule in institutional analysis worth remembering: organisations measure what matters to them. Germany measures, with extraordinary precision, the rate of joint legal custody continuation in divorces. It measures the number of Sorgerechtsentzüge. It measures the age and gender breakdown of children affected by Kindeswohlgefährdung proceedings. The Statistical Office produces detailed annual reports on each of these.

What it does not measure is the rate at which judges defer to Jugendamt recommendations. What it does not measure is the outcome of binational custody cases. What it does not measure is the actual physical custody arrangement of children after parental separation.

The pattern is not random. The things Germany measures are the things Germany is comfortable being measured on. The things Germany doesn't measure are the things that would expose it.

What this means for German children — not just German fathers

It is tempting, in any debate about family law, to slide into adversarial framing: mothers versus fathers, German versus foreign, activists versus the establishment. Resist that. The actual victims of this system are the children.

Walper's 2018 analysis of German Family Panel data found that 23 percent of children of separated parents have no contact at all with their non-resident parent. A further 16 to 32 percent of fathers lose all contact with their children within two years of separation.

These children grew up — are growing up — with one parent functionally erased from their lives. Some of those erasures are justified. Some involve abusive parents whom the system rightly kept away. But it is not credible that all of them are justified, and the German state has chosen not to investigate which is which.

The published research is unambiguous on what happens to these children. Higher rates of depression, anxiety, behavioural problems, academic underperformance, and adult relationship instability than children whose post-separation arrangements maintained meaningful contact with both parents. Forty-plus studies, multiple meta-analyses, replicated across Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and Australia.

The German Federal Court of Justice ruled in February 2017 that family courts can order shared physical custody against one parent's wishes when this serves the child's best interests. Seven years later, fewer than 5 percent of separated German families live this arrangement.

The court permission exists. The judicial willingness does not. And the data that would force the question — about why the gap between law and practice is so large, about who is on which side of that gap, about whether the gap is structurally biased — does not exist either.

The Cochem Irony

There is a particular detail in this story that deserves to be widely known, because it captures the German political failure more precisely than any indictment could.

In the mid-1990s, in Cochem, Rhineland-Palatinate, a group of family-court judges, lawyers, Jugendamt staff and counselling services developed what became known as the Cochem Model. The first court hearing happens within fourteen days of a custody case being filed. All professionals involved — judge, lawyer, social worker, counsellor — work cooperatively rather than adversarially. The focus is agreement rather than adjudication. The result, where it has been applied, is a dramatic reduction in conflict, in litigation duration, and in cases that reach a contested judgment.

The Cochem Model is one of the most successful procedural innovations in European family law. The Council of Europe explicitly endorsed it in Resolution 2079 (2015). Belgium adopted a version of it in Dinant in 2012. Other European countries have implemented it in pieces.

Germany — the country that invented it — has never made it the national standard.

That is, by itself, almost the entire story. A country that invented the solution, watched its neighbour adopt it, and chose not to use the solution itself.

Five questions every German politician should be asked

The point of this article is not to persuade the politicians. They have heard all of this before. They have, collectively and across parties, declined to act on it for over a decade. The point is to give every German citizen — and every concerned observer outside Germany — a small set of specific questions that any politician seeking your vote should be required to answer on the record.

If your local Bundestag representative, your Landtag representative, your Bürgermeister, your Familienministerin, or any candidate at any level cannot give a clear answer to these five questions, you have learned something important about whether they are serious about the welfare of German children.

These are not trick questions. They have factual, on-the-record answers that any politician engaged with family policy should be able to give. The interesting moments come when they cannot.

The closing point

There is a simple test that distinguishes a legitimate complaint about a system from an empty grievance.

A legitimate complaint produces a question that the accused institution can answer with publicly available data.

The accusation against the German family-law system is that it systematically disadvantages fathers, particularly non-German fathers, through a Jugendamt recommendation pipeline that judges almost always rubber-stamp.

The question that would settle the matter is simple and specific. How often do judges follow Jugendamt recommendations? What are the outcomes for non-German parents?

The European Parliament has been asking this question, in formal resolutions, for more than a decade.

Germany has not answered.

Until Germany answers, every politician who has held federal or Land office in family policy during this period bears a share of the institutional silence. Every refusal to answer becomes part of the record. And every German child who lost contact with a parent in the years that data could have been collected, but wasn't, is a child whose loss the German state has chosen not to count.

That is what is at stake here. Not adult grievance. Not gender war. Not activism.

A state that won't count the cost it imposes on children.