Since earlier this year, Germany has a Violence Assistance Law, or Gewalthilfegesetz. It gives victims of gender-specific violence a legal right to free access to counseling, shelter and other forms of support. It places on the individual german states the burden to ensure that the support services are available, or face legal action if they fail to provide the service. The federal government plans to subsidize the necessary expansion of abuse shelter networks by 2.6 billion Euros in the coming years.

The law's story is a great illustration of tunnel vision, gendered favouritism, and government-supplied disinformation all leading to an erosion of fundamental rights.

It started in 2024, when the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA; basically an analogue of US FBI) prepared a report on Gender-Specific Crimes Targeting Women 2023 (press release and full report if you feel curious; all in German of course). The report surveys all crimes from year 2023 that are either motivated by hatred towards women or that affect women disproportionately.

One of the crimes the report was supposed to cover is 'femicide'. But there is no official definition of femicide in German law, and the popular meaning of femicide as "murder of a woman because she is a woman" is impossible to use, since the crime data do not carry information about motives. So the report simply included all murders with a female victim, of which there were 360 in 2023. They explain it pretty clearly in the press release (google-translated):

Since there is currently no uniform definition of femicide and the motivation behind the crime is not recorded in the PKS, the situation report indicates the total number of female victims of homicide.

as well as in the report itself (p. 36, emphasis mine):

Two key challenges must be considered when defining the femicide case group: First, there is currently no uniform nationwide definition of femicide; second, the PKS data only provide an approximation of the actual number of killings of girls and women that could be classified as femicides. The PKS does not record the motives behind the crimes. This makes it unclear whether the recorded cases were gender-specific crimes directed against women. Homicides of women therefore cannot be interpreted as femicides in the general sense of "the killing of a woman because she is a woman" based on the PKS data.

Nevertheless, Lisa Paus, Germany's Minister for Families, Seniors, Women and Youth, did not allow truth and accuracy to stand in the way of a good moral panic, and she promptly embraced precisely the disinterpretation the BKA report warned against, declaring in her speech on occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women that "In the year 2023, 360 German women and girls were victims of femicide, that is, they were murdered solely because they were women" [my translation]. The disinformation about 360 women being killed because they were women has been widely repeated by the media.

And like any savvy politician, Lisa Paus would not start a moral panic without already having a Solution ready. The proposed solution was the Gewalthilfegesetz, presented to the Bundestag (Germany's lower chamber of the parliament) early in 2025. Despite minister Paus's rhetoric about protecting women, the proposed law was actually formulated in a gender-neutral language, and would also give guaranteed protection to male victims of domestic violence. But this was not to last.

At the time the law was being debated, Germany was ruled by a moribund government, whose supporting left-leaning coalition of SPD (social democrats), the Green Party and the FDP (centrist libertarians) had already collapsed. So to get the law passed, the SPD and the Greens needed to cooperate with the conservative CDU/CSU (Christian democrats), who were then the main opposition party. And it was the CDU/CSU who insisted to amend the law so it would explicitly only cover women; morever, they also rejected any language that would extend the protection to trans or non-binary people.

The leftist parties did not like this too much (or so they would later claim), but they did not press the issue, and the amended version of the law, which only protected cis-female victims, was passed. The Greens, the SPD, the Left (communist-adjacent), and the CDU/CSU supported it unanimously, the FDP and the AfD (Nazi-adjacent) unanimously abstained; there was no vote against. The law was then rubberstamped by the senate and by the president, and came into force.

Lisa Paus's ministry celebrated the outcome, with the minister herself repeating her little lie about 360 women killed because they were women. The Federal Coordination Office for the Protection of Male Victims of Violence (yes, there is such an institution in Germany) published a timid protest against excluding men, trans- and non-binary people, while the Federal Association of Transpeople published a more forceful protest against excluding trans people (not mentioning cis-men), decrying it as "trans*misogyny". But apart from these lonely voices, the law has been mostly celebrated by the press.

And just like that, German men were excluded from legal protections against abuse, and trans-women were excluded as well, presumably to avert the risk that a devious male abuse victim might feign a transition to a transwoman to illicitly gain access to victim support services.

Further reading about the story (all in German, mostly blogs related to men's issues): Genderama, MannDat, Alles Evolution.