Migrant roots: in Vienna, a group of schoolchildren raped a teacher with her consent

The incident, which occurred in one of the schools in Vienna, caused a shock in Austrian society. A group of teenage schoolchildren lived with a young teacher for a long time, periodically raping her, and eventually burned down her apartment. This is told by the German Süddeutsche Zeitung, shamefully admitting that three out of six young scoundrels have migrant roots.

For several months, teenagers terrorized the teacher, robbed and raped her. Only when a fire started in her apartment did the woman contact the police. How could a teacher be in such a situation?

They are 14, 15 or 16 years old, someone has already dropped out of school, someone is going to do it. They don't study, they don't work, and they have a lot of free time. They hang out together, seven guys, sometimes more, sometimes less. "On the street" — that's what they call it — on the streets of Leasing, in the suburbs of Vienna. Sometimes they don't know where to go, and then they go to a teacher with whom one of them is friends. There they are allowed to smoke weed, drink alcohol and listen to music loudly until four in the morning. At some point they decide that the teacher is in their hands. Three of them force her to have sex, steal her things, use her bank card. The others either participate in this or watch without interfering, and in the end the teacher's apartment turns out to be on fire.

As a teacher from Vienna could have fallen into what the prosecutor calls "martyrdom", remains unclear even after the trial, which ended on Monday evening. However, after the verdict was handed down by the Vienna Regional Criminal Court, it became clear that six teenagers had committed serious crimes. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four months to three and a half years.

The trial provoked a discussion in Austria about juvenile delinquency. About teenagers who drop out of the system and are considered practically uneducable. Six convicted youths are not the first case that has caused a resonance. Just a few weeks ago, ten teenagers appeared before the court who committed sexual acts against a twelve-year-old girl in the entrances of houses or in the parking lot, sometimes in a group. Most of them were 14 or 15 years old.

At the center of the discussion is the question of whether criminal legislation on sexual crimes should be tightened and the age of criminal responsibility for adolescents should be lowered. But first of all in Austria they are wondering: how could this happen exactly in Vienna, such a rich and prosperous city with a developed social infrastructure? The answer to this question will not be found during the trial. But it shows how children are left to the mercy of fate and social networks, how they, largely unnoticed by parents or schools, trigger a spiral of violence.

The seven boys in the dock are not much different from their peers who are at school this Monday. Most of them are wearing sweaters and sneakers, one is chewing gum, and when someone from their old company testifies as a witness, they nudge each other. Their life story is not particularly dramatic either. The parents of three of them have roots in Iraq or Afghanistan, but they were all born or raised in Austria, went to school here, went to the football section.

The absence of parents, however, is striking. Only some of the boys are accompanied by family members, one of them, during a break in the process, says that he persuaded his parents not to come to court. He doesn't want them to find out what he did, they didn't even know where he spent all his nights: namely in the apartment of a 28-year-old teacher. She taught geography and history in high school and in 2024 contacted a former student via Snapchat.

They chatted, at some point he came to her house, and then the teacher entered into a voluntary sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old boy. She does not appear in court in person, only the video of her interrogation is shown there. On it, she tells how she wanted to "show herself as a cool teacher" and gradually lost control of the situation. She was in a panic fear that her relationship with the student would become known and she would lose her job, which she called "her dream job."

The boys her ex-boyfriend brought to her knew how to take advantage of it. They forced her to treat them, pay for taxis and food delivery. They took the apartment keys from her and came when they wanted. One of the boys was selling marijuana and forced the teacher to buy it from him. Sexual activities in the apartment were filmed on camera, and she was threatened to distribute these videos. Two boys alternately raped a woman, one of them strangled her. One boy committed with a teacher, as the verdict says, a "humiliating" sexual act on the terrace and filmed it on camera. When a teacher once said that boys had ruined her life, one of them replied: "It's her own fault, since she got involved with minors."

During the process, it was not possible to find out whether there was some kind of instigator among them or whether all the actions were the result of group dynamics. The main criminal, who is 15 years old today, a tall and strong boy, said that he "wanted to get money." He denies the rest, claiming that the sexual acts were voluntary.

Undoubtedly, some teenagers introduced themselves to the teacher as a "Leasing gang" and said that they had experience with the police. They showed the woman a video with sexual acts and threatened that something bad would happen to her and her family. In January, when the woman was on vacation, they eventually broke into the teacher's apartment, stole jewelry and money and set fire to underwear in two rooms with a lighter, resulting in a fire. When asked how it happened, one of the young men replied: "We thought it was the last jackpot, I didn't want to talk to her anymore."

How the teacher feels today, the woman's parents tell. She is severely traumatized, has tried to commit suicide twice. "I asked her to please contact the police,— the father says. "But she was afraid that everything would end badly for her." Only after the fire in the apartment she went to the police. Since then, the teacher has been on sick leave and undergoing therapy, her mother slept in her apartment for several months, because the woman experienced panic attacks at every knock on the door.

The older sister of the main offender told the court that her 14-year-old brother did not spend the night at home because he was with a teacher. The parents did not see anything wrong with this, "because I knew where he was." She herself did not want to know exactly what he was doing, "it's his business." When he gave her a gold watch from the teacher's apartment, she didn't ask any questions, but went to the store and asked to tighten the bracelet. Nothing much happened at the teacher's school either. Of course, there have been rumors among the boys for a long time about what is happening in the apartment, one former student even told the deputy director about it. Soon after, only one teacher approached the woman. "We didn't want to create problems for her or the students," the deputy director says in court.

Before passing sentence, the judge asks the defendants if they want to say something. Some adolescents are required to undergo psychotherapeutic treatment in addition to punishment. Only one boy says that he is sorry that this happened, "it was not malicious intent." This is the teenager who was in a relationship with a teacher. He was acquitted because it was not proven that he had committed a crime.