Elisabeth Trube-Becker

Elisabeth Trube-Becker (* January 4, 1919 in Düsseldorf ; † February 1, 2012 in Neuss ) was the first female holder of a professorship for forensic medicine in Germany and throughout her life a committed pioneer for the human rights of children and against the dark field of child abuse .

Life

She was born in the winter of economic hardship after the end of the First World War. She came from a middle-class background, studied medicine and received her doctorate in the war year 1942. From 1948 she worked at the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of Düsseldorf. There she obtained her habilitation in 1951 and a little later was offered a professorship in this field, to date the first woman to hold such a chair in Germany. She remained there throughout her professional life and developed a lively research and educational activity in the field of infanticide and child abuse that went beyond what was technically required.

Right at the beginning of her professional activity, at the end of the 1940s, she achieved that apparently abused dead children were no longer autopsied in cemetery buildings or clinic rooms , but uniformly in the Forensic Medicine Institute, where the cases could be documented in detail . At the beginning of the 1950s, she managed to ensure that, for the first time, all children with unknown causes of death were handed over to forensic medicine in her sphere of influence in the Rhineland. Since she devoted her attention to a taboo topic that had mostly been hushed up to date , namely children abused by their own parents, she had to contend with a lot of public criticism. Against resistance, she achieved awareness among paediatricians, in clinics and in the media. In order to better understand the perpetrators , whom she often encountered as an expert in court , she completed further training as a psychotherapist and the public health officer course in psychiatry .

She found out that overwhelmed parents who cannot cope with difficult children of their own (for example so-called crying babies ) are much more common than is generally publicly perceived, and in all social classes. However, many cases of abuse cannot be easily proven with conventional diagnostics. Two examples:

• Subcutaneous injuries from electrocution punitive actions often cannot be determined by looking at them.
• The shaking trauma in small children was only scientifically described in 1974 by forensic medicine . Bleeding inside the skull caused by shaking or hitting had gone undetected until then. The affected victims were identified as sudden infant deaths, since there are no externally recognizable signs.

After her retirement , she wrote an autobiography in addition to smaller specialist articles and over the years three literary publications with poems and prose.

The grande dame of German forensic medicine last lived in the district town of Neuss on the Lower Rhine . In addition to her own professional life, she raised seven children, two of her own and five from her husband Georg Trube's first marriage.

Child abuse quotes

"It's a lot of nonsense to believe that abuse only occurs in the lower class .
"
Today there are supposedly more cases - because fortunately more is recognized ."
"Very few act with a conscious intention to kill, and the sadistic component also plays a minor role."
"Perhaps it's not so much a question of being overwhelmed, but rather one of mentality , one gets carried away beating a child so badly that it dies.”

– Elisabeth Trube-Becker

Works (selection)

• Historical perspective of sexual contact between adults and children/adolescents and the social acceptance of this phenomenon from Roman and Greek times to the present . In: Sexual Abuse. 3rd, revised and adult Edition 2005
• lived life. Memoirs of a doctor for forensic medicine Kovac, Hamburg 2000. 172 S, ISBN 3-8300-0083-9 .
• Lines of Life: Poems . Haag and Herchen, Frankfurt am Main 1995
• Abused children - sexual violence and economic exploitation . Kriminalistik-Verlag, Heidelberg 1992. 114 pages, ISBN 3-7832-0492-5 .
• On the sexual abuse of infants and young children . In: Medical law , psychopathology, forensic medicine: on this side and beyond the borders of law and medicine , Festschrift for Günter Schewe . Springer-Verlag, Berlin etc. 1991. – pp. 602-610
• Violence against the child: neglect, abuse , sexual abuse and killing of children . Kriminalistik-Verlag, Heidelberg 1982. 225 p. 20 ill. 11 tab, ISBN 3783216818 .
• Women as murderers: with 86 case studies and 34 tabs. Goldmann, Munich 1974. 279 pages, ISBN 3-442-70019-1 .
• The Papillary Patterns of Man and Their Significance in Fatherhood . Düsseldorf habilitation on February 26, 1951

literature

• Antje Kahnt: Düsseldorf's strong women - 30 portraits Droste, Düsseldorf 2016, ISBN 978-3-7700-1577-1 , pp. 121-126.

web links

• Trube-Becker in the archive of the University of Düsseldorf
• Literature by and about Elisabeth Trube-Becker in the German National Library catalogue

itemizations

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Heike Haarhoff: The human measure , In: taz , February 22, 2007, p. 5, 355 Z. (TAZ report).