For more than ten years, workplace classes in Bremen have told staff that making yourself sick can break a rape attempt. The quote is real. The fight is over what the police will not put next to it.
A city police force has spent a decade teaching a tip that most people only hear about when a local paper prints it. In an attack, the advice goes, you can make yourself vomit. The disgust, the instructors say, may stop the man. The line is not a joke on a forum. It is a spoken part of a seminar run by the Bremen police, confirmed this week by their own spokeswoman. What the class does not open with is the other half of the story: recorded sex attacks in Germany have kept rising, and in this same city the share of suspects without a German passport is far above their share of the people who live there. One side calls the tip a last-ditch tool. The other calls it a confession that the street has been handed back to the woman, one odd trick at a time.
What the spokeswoman actually said
The report landed on 5 October 2026 in the regional paper Kreiszeitung, written by Gregor Hühne. The paper was looking at staff training in the Diepholz district, next door to Bremen. From there the trail led to the Central Police Prevention unit in the city-state of Bremen.
Franka Haedke, spokeswoman for the Bremen police leadership staff, told the paper that the unit has offered self-assertion seminars for more than ten years. They run in firms, public offices and medical sites. Staff from local trains and buses, the fire service, job centers and social offices can sit in as well. The class covers how to spot danger, how to step a fight down, how a bystander can step in, and what to do in a sexual attack. People in the room are asked to talk about things that have already happened to them, so the advice can be shaped to real cases.
On the rape tip, Haedke was plain. The paper quotes her as saying:
“In an emergency, such as an attempted rape, defend yourself with all means at hand. Making yourself vomit can also be an effective way to ward off a sexual offense.”
The class, the paper reports, tells people they can set off a gag by putting a finger down the throat. The idea is that the sight and smell will break the attacker’s drive and buy a chance to run. Haedke did not sell this as the one right move. She called it one option among others. She also said the courses help people “spot dangers early, handle conflict, and act with a clear head,” and that from the police point of view they should be run again and again.
That is the whole official frame. A tool in a bag. Not an order. Not a national campaign. The same paper lists the other, more ordinary tips the prevention sheets already give: trust your gut, plan a way out, speak up, use the formal “you,” shout, blow a whistle, ask a named person for help, run if you can, call the police. The vomit line is the one that traveled, because it is the one that sounds like the state has run out of better ideas.
Why this tip is not new, and why it still stings
German police have a short, awkward record of telling women to change their own body or their own night, rather than naming who is doing the attacking.
In late August 2024 a Berlin police page told people facing violent behavior to do something the attacker does not expect. One example was to start singing out loud. A screenshot spread. On 1 September 2024 Berlin police said the line came from psychiatry groups, did not match what officers see, and had been dropped in 2023. The old page had lingered. They also said the tip was never meant for a terror attack, a rampage, or a knife. The page was cleaned. The memory was not.
Go back to New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne. Hundreds of women were groped, robbed, and in some cases raped around the station, in a crush that later files tied in large part to North African arrivals. Mayor Henriette Reker told women to keep “a certain distance of more than an arm’s length” from men they did not know, and to avoid acts that could be “misread.” Germany’s justice minister was among those who called the line wrong. CNN carried the row: the arm’s-length advice.
Sweden had its own version that winter. In Östersund, after a run of assaults and an attempted rape, police chief Stephen Jerand told women who wanted to be out at night to get a ride or walk in a group. He said it was a fact, not a ban. The Telegraph reported it in March 2016. German cities gave joggers a similar list. After a rape in Rosental park in Leipzig in 2017, officers said it was better to run in pairs and to look back when passing people. The mayor said that cut into women’s freedom. After an attack in Munich’s English Garden in 2016, police told runners to pick lit paths, leave the headphones off, and carry a whistle. Less strange than singing or vomiting. The question is the same: if the park is no longer safe, why is the public answer a whistle?
Set the Bremen line next to those and the pattern is hard to miss. The tips change. The person being told to change does not. She should stand farther away. She should not go out alone. She should sing. She should make herself sick. Each tip can be defended on its own night. Together they read as a long retreat from the old promise that the street belongs to everyone after dark.
The numbers the seminar does not open with
Kreiszeitung did not stop at the quote. It put a federal count under the headline. The Federal Criminal Police Office, the BKA, recorded 14,454 cases in 2025 of rape, sexual coercion and sexual assault in the most serious bracket, including cases that ended in death. That was almost a tenth higher than the year before.
The BKA’s own 2024 fact sheet, still the last full published year with a clean table, shows the path:
- 2019: 9,426 cases
- 2020: 9,752
- 2021: 9,903
- 2022: 11,896
- 2023: 12,186
- 2024: 13,320, up 9.3 percent on the year
From 2019 to the 2025 figure cited by the paper, the count is up by about half. Remix News, which carried the Bremen story in English on 8 October 2026, says the rise since 2018 is 72 percent, pointing to its own earlier crime piece. That 72 percent figure is Remix’s, not a line in the BKA press note. The direction of the official series is not in doubt. The size of the rise depends on the start year, and the BKA has warned for years that the sex-crime law was rewritten in 2016, so older years do not sit on the same scale.
The BKA also offers the reading officials prefer. Part of the climb, it says, may be more women willing to report, the “me too” years, the 2016 law, and heavier news coverage. A move from hidden crime into recorded crime is real. It does not, by itself, explain a near-steady climb across six years, or the skew in who is named as a suspect. Of the 13,485 victims logged in this group in 2024, 12,641 were women or girls. That is 93.7 percent. The suspects are almost all male.
What “foreign” means in the tables, and what it does not
Police tables in Germany do not record “migrant” as one box. They record citizenship. A “non-German” suspect is a person without a German passport. That box holds a long-settled shop owner, a truck driver, a tourist, a man with no right to be in the country, and a man who arrived in the 2015–16 wave. It does not hold a man born in Germany to foreign parents who later took a German passport. He is counted as German. The table can both overstate and understate, depending on the question.
A second box is narrower. The BKA yearly picture on “crime in the context of immigration” counts Zuwanderer: asylum seekers, people with protection, quota refugees, people with a tolerated stay. In December 2025 the office said this group was 8.8 percent of all suspects in 2024. Of roughly 1.97 million suspects, about 172,200 fell in that box. A wider non-German group, about 697,000, sat outside it. On sex offenses, the immigration-status share of suspects was about 7.9 percent, Zeit reported from the same release. Men from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were a small slice of arrivals and a much larger slice of suspects inside that arrival group. Ukrainians were the opposite.
Those two boxes are why two papers can print opposite headlines from the same year. “New arrivals are not driving sex crime” can be true of the narrow box. “Men without a German passport are named far more often than their share of the people” can be true of the wide box. Both lines can be printed. Only one of them usually is.
On the wide box, a compilation of the 2024 BKA suspect tables by kriminalstatistik.org puts non-Germans at 4,437 of 11,329 suspects in this rape-and-serious-assault group, or 39.2 percent. Their share of the population was about 14.8 percent. That is roughly two and a half times the rate you would expect if the groups matched. The site itself adds the limits: a suspect is not a man found guilty, and some non-Germans in the police file do not live in the population count used as the base. Age matters too. The suspect pool is heavy with young men, and the non-German population is younger and more male than the German one. No serious reader should treat 39 percent as “39 percent of rapes are by foreigners, full stop.” A serious reader also should not treat the gap as a rounding error.
Bremen, up close
The city where the vomit tip is taught is not a quiet exception.
In a written answer to the Bremen state parliament, the Senate set out the local table for the same offense key. Cases in the state of Bremen rose from 108 in 2015 to 191 in 2024. Suspects in 2024: 145 in all, 75 with a German passport, 70 without. That is 48 percent non-German suspects. In the city of Bremen proper the split was 112 suspects, 52 German and 60 non-German. The most common foreign passports named in recent years include Afghanistan, Syria and Turkey, and in some years Bulgaria, Gambia and others. The Senate also warned that a suspect rate per 100,000 by nationality is a weak tool here, because the groups are small and the base is shaky.
Remix, drawing on Weser-Kurier and the federal office for civic education, calls Bremen the highest-crime major city in Germany on a per-person basis, at about 15,424 recorded crimes per 100,000 people, ahead of Frankfurt and Berlin, and the state with the highest share of residents with a migration background, about 45 percent. A separate Remix line says 49 percent of rapes in Bremen were by foreigners against a 23 percent foreign-passport population. The parliament table for 2024 lands close to that 49 percent on suspects, not on court verdicts. The 23 percent and the 45 percent are not the same measure. One is passports. One is background. Outlets that pick only one of them are choosing a mood.
A March 2026 local crime note adds a fresher beat. Overall recorded crime in Bremen in 2025 fell, to about 94,400 cases. Knife attacks did not. Officers logged more than 500, about a third higher than the year before. Attacks on police and rescue crews rose sharply. The interior senator spoke of a harder tone in daily life. A city can have fewer bike thefts and a worse night at the same time. The seminar tip belongs to the second story, not the first.
The two readings, set side by side
Reading one is the police reading, and it is not empty. In a closed fight, with no witness, anything that breaks a man’s focus can be the difference between getting away and not. Disgust is a real reflex. Trainers in many countries already tell people to shout, go limp, or act ill. Haedke did not say the move works every time. She did not say it replaces running or a call to 110. Diepholz’s county office said sexual attacks on its staff are not the daily threat. Verbal threats at the counter are. To treat the quote as a national order is to stretch it.
Reading two is the one mass news leaves between sentences. If the threat were rare, a force would not need a ten-year class on how to make yourself sick. The count is not rare, and it is not flat. The suspect tables are not a mirror of the population. Cologne was not a rumor. Berlin’s singing tip had to be walked back. Swedish police told women to stop walking alone. Each note can be filed as local. Together they read as a policy of asking the likely victim to adapt, while the pattern in the suspect file is treated as a thing one must not say in a clean sentence.
The thing not said is simple. Men from a small set of countries show up in these files far above their share of arrivals. Officials answer with the true limits of the table: suspects, not verdicts; age and sex; reporting rates; passport versus background. Those limits are real. They are also used as a door out before the ratio is read aloud. A suspect file is not a guilty verdict. The gap is also not noise.
What a woman is being asked to carry
There is a body cost even to the tip as a tip. Forcing a gag can tear the throat and pull acid into the lungs in the minute a person needs strength. No paper in this story offers a study showing the move stops attacks at a known rate. It is a guess, passed on in a room, now confirmed to a newspaper.
That is the quiet shift. Safety used to be a public good: lights, patrols, fast charges, removal after a conviction where the law allows it, and a clear rule that the street at night is not a hunting ground. The seminar version is private. Carry a whistle. Do not run alone. Keep an arm’s length. If it comes to it, make yourself sick. None of those lines is aimed at the man who has already decided the park is his.
Other states have started writing the blunt part down. Britain’s Home Office this year put out a short guide for new asylum seekers that defines rape as sex without consent and says a child under 16 cannot consent. Planet Today covered it in August: UK asylum guide tells new arrivals rape is a crime. A guide is not a patrol. It is still a sign that someone was willing to write the rule for people just arriving, not only for the women already there.
Schools show the same gap. A Rhineland teacher told Bild in August 2026 that a secondary school with a large migrant-background share was calling police several times a week. Planet Today’s write-up: the teacher’s account. One school is not a country. It is a window on the same choice as the Bremen class: train the staff to cope, and leave the mix of the room unspoken.
What would count as an honest public line
An honest line would quote Haedke in full, give the BKA series with its note on reporting, and set the passport split next to the migration-background split. It would say a suspect file is not a sentence, and that the gap is too wide to waive away. It would keep the narrow asylum box separate from the wide non-German box. And it would say that a city which answers a rising rape count with a gag reflex has chosen the woman as the site of policy. One reader will hear a last-ditch tip and stop. Another will hear a force that no longer believes it can hold the night. The record supports both. It does not support skipping the table, or treating every man without a German passport as the same man.
The point the class never reaches
Haedke is right about one narrow thing. In the worst minute, a woman should use what she has. What is in dispute is the decade around that minute. A unit that has taught this for ten years is not looking at a new shock. It is looking at a settled risk, and teaching the target how to be harder to want. The risk has a shape in the federal tables and in the Bremen parliament answer. Mass news can quote the spokeswoman and skip the shape. Other outlets can quote the shape and skip the limits. The shape is still there when both have finished. Until a city will say it out loud, the class will keep filling the silence. Whistles, pairs, arm’s length, a song, a sick stomach. The list will grow. The night will not get its old rules back by accident.
Sources
- Gregor Hühne, “Polizei empfiehlt Erbrechen als Schutz vor Vergewaltigung,” Kreiszeitung, 5 October 2026: kreiszeitung.de
- Remix News, “German police advise women to vomit to stop rape attacks,” 8 October 2026: rmx.news
- BKA, Police crime statistics 2024, rape and serious sexual assault fact sheet and national report: bka.de
- BKA, “Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung 2024,” released December 2025: bka.de Lagebild
- Bremen Bürgerschaft, Senate answer on rape suspects 2015–2024, printed paper D21L/1621: bremische-buergerschaft.de
- Suspect split compiled from BKA 2024 tables: kriminalstatistik.org
- CNN, Cologne mayor’s arm’s-length remarks, 6 January 2016: cnn.com
- Telegraph, Östersund police warning, 2016: telegraph.co.uk
- Berliner Zeitung, Berlin police remove singing tip, 1 September 2024: berliner-zeitung.de
- Related on this site: UK asylum guide on rape · Rhineland school account · Germany political crime, 2025
Original report
Primary local report: Gregor Hühne, Kreiszeitung, 5 October 2026, “Polizei empfiehlt Erbrechen als Schutz vor Vergewaltigung.” Full link: https://www.kreiszeitung.de/lokales/diepholz/diepholz-ort28581/polizei-empfiehlt-erbrechen-als-schutz-vor-vergewaltigung-94523955.html
English write-up that spread the story: Remix News, 8 October 2026: https://rmx.news/article/german-police-advise-women-vomit-to-stop-rape-attacks/
Note on sources
Kreiszeitung is a regional German paper and the outlet that first quoted the Bremen spokeswoman. The BKA tables and the Bremen Senate answer are official suspect counts, not court verdicts. Remix News is a commentary site with a clear line on immigration; its 72 percent claim and its “most dangerous city” label are attributed to Remix, not treated as a police title. Berlin police have said the singing tip was withdrawn and was not their operational advice. Readers should separate a reported seminar tip from a national order, and a suspect share from a conviction share.