Lecture 1: "sicher.net § 207a" – A Sexual and Social Education Program of the Austrian Probation Service

The everyday lives of adolescents and young adults are shaped by a wide range of activities in virtual spaces. Content such as posts, images, etc. is consumed and downloaded, but also created, forwarded, and made available. This entails a whole series of challenges as well as criminal law risks — not only, but also, in the context of “visual sexual representations of minors” (§ 207a of the Austrian Criminal Code). To address this, NEUSTART has developed the program “sicher.net § 207a”, which can be implemented in individual settings or in a combination of individual and group settings.

Lecture 2: Conspicuous Juvenile Delinquency Is a Cry for Help!

Individual minors who stand out due to particularly extensive or serious delinquent behavior are used by politicians as an occasion to call for lowering the age of criminal responsibility in order to respond to their misconduct with harsher sanctions.

What is often overlooked is that serious delinquency among adolescents is primarily an indicator of child welfare endangerment; nearly all affected minors have previously been victims of violence, neglect, or broken relationships. If delinquency is not taken seriously as a cry for help and if young people are not offered a real opportunity to compensate for their developmental deficits, they face a further massive deterioration of their mental and physical health.