What can be done to protect young children from sexual assault? Lower Saxony’s Minister of the Interior, Boris Pistorius, is promoting the use of artificial intelligence.

After the discovery of serious child abuse in Wermelskirchen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony’s Interior Minister Boris Pistorius promoted the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to cope with the amount of data in investigations.

This could relieve the police in the investigation, said Pistorius of the “Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung” (Thursday). Software is currently being tested in Lower Saxony to evaluate the huge amounts of data that are generated in such procedures, said the SPD politician.

The case in Wermelskirchen

Lower Saxony’s Justice Minister Barbara Havliza sees data protection as an obstacle for the investigators. “The lack of data prevents us from investigating and preventing acts of abuse,” said the CDU politician to the newspaper. “We need the best possible protection for our children, data protection must not take precedence here.” As a legislature, the federal government urgently needs to take action. “It’s about the brutal desecration, rape, killing and psychological and physical injury of even the smallest children,” said Pistorius. The extent of the proceedings with five suspects from Lower Saxony is shocking. “The acts are incredibly brutal and inhuman.”

Investigators had reported on Monday about the most brutal abuse of children, the youngest victim was one month old. The main suspect is a 44-year-old from Wermelskirchen, who is said to have offered his services as a babysitter on the Internet and thus approached his victims. So far, 73 suspects and 33 victims have been identified. It took 17 days to back up the data from 232 data carriers. Investigators discovered 3.5 million image files and 1.5 million videos on a hard drive.