Press release No. 363 of 17 September 2020
- Number of cases was down 6% year on year
- Number of cases of minors taken into care after entering the country unaccompanied decreased strongly: -29%
- Overburdened parents were most frequent reason (38%)
WIESBADEN – In 2019, the youth welfare offices in Germany took approximately 49.500 temporary measures for the protection of children and young people, by taking them into care. As reported by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) to mark the World Children's Day on 20 September, that was a decrease of 6% or nearly 3,100 cases on a year earlier. This development is due to a further decline in the number of protective measures taken when unaccompanied minors enter the country. The cases in which such minors were taken into care fell by 29% to 8,600 compared with the previous year. At the same time the number of protection measures taken for other reasons rose by 1% to 40,900 cases. This means that another long-term trend continues: in the past ten years there has been a 30% increase, with slight fluctuations, in the number of cases of children and young people being taken into care for other reasons, from roughly 31,500 cases in 2009.
Basic data and long time series are available in table Temporary protective measures for children and adolescents (22523) in the GENESIS-Online database.
