Gewaltschutzambulanz — Charité Berlin's Police-Report-Free Forensic Documentation Clinic

The Gewaltschutzambulanz (Violence Protection Outpatient Clinic) opened at Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin on 17 February 2014, offering free forensic-medical examination and legally valid, court-admissible documentation (written report plus photographs) of injuries from domestic violence, sexual violence, interpersonal and workplace violence, and child abuse. Crucially, survivors can access this documentation without first filing a police report, preserving evidence for possible future criminal, civil or family-court proceedings even if they are not yet ready to press charges.
In its first year of operation, 382 people contacted the clinic; 196 presented with visible injuries and 175 (109 adults, 66 children) received full forensic documentation, of whom 74 adult cases involved domestic violence. Over its first decade, roughly 13,000 violence-affected people have used the service — evidence of substantial, sustained demand for police-independent forensic documentation in a single city.
The clinic's data have also fed independent peer-reviewed research: a study published in the journal Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology used Gewaltschutzambulanz case records to analyse male victims of intimate-partner violence, an under-studied population, demonstrating the clinic functions as a genuine clinical-forensic evidence base beyond service delivery alone.
The Berlin model has been explicitly replicated elsewhere in Germany: Bremen built its own Gewaltschutzambulanz directly modelled on Charité's, and comparable clinics have since opened in cities including Munich, Hamburg, Hannover and Düsseldorf, with Baden-Württemberg's state government funding further sites in Ulm, Freiburg and Stuttgart after an initial Heidelberg clinic — though coverage nationally remains uneven (Bavaria, for instance, has only the single Munich site for the whole state).
Limitations: no published study measures the clinic's effect on prosecution or conviction rates, victim safety, or recidivism, and no cost-efficiency analysis was found; the peer-reviewed research found relates to a specific sub-population (male victims) rather than the service as a whole.

Read the full analysis: https://gewaltschutzambulanz.charite.de/en/