Rebel Rabbit

The center piece of this picture is a woman with a rabbit head. I called her Rebel Rabbit| bottom right |. The street-art piece was created by Miss Van. The ap-pearance of her red head and full lips reminded me of Christiane F., the main character in the movie “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo(We Children of Bahnhof Zoo)”.As a child, Christiane F. lived in Gropiusstadt, a social housing neighborhood in the southern dis-trict of Neukölln. The high-rise concrete apartment blocks at the center of my image represent Christi-ane’s troubled childhood. Christiane’s father drank and was abusive to his two daughters. Her mother had affairs. She began smoking hashish at twelve with a group of slightly older friends and gradually moved on to LSD and pills, and eventually she tried heroin. By the time she was 14, she was addicted to heroin and had to prostitute herself, mainly at West Berlin's main railway station, “Bahnhof Zoo”, to support her addiction. The speech bubble says “Brauche ich den ganze Mist wirklich / Do I really need all that crap”. Close to Zoo Station you will find the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, | bottom left |.Child prostitution is still an ongoing problem in Berlin. Only the setting has changed. Berlin's Tier-garten Park has become a notorious drug haven and a place for men seeking to pay for sex with young boys. According to the Berlin aid group Subway, many of the young boys forced into prostitution are homeless refugees or from poor EU countries such as Romania and Bulgaria. “Most of them fled to Germany with the hope of finding a better life. Now some young, male refugees say that drugs and prostitution are their only means of getting by. Part of what drives refugees to prostitution is that during the asylum application process, they have no access to language or integration classes. Underage refu-gees travelling alone are looked after. But as soon as they are adults, they are not cared for” | quoting “Moabit hilft” chair Diana Henniges |.“Some of the male prostitutes charge as little as € 5 or € 10 for sexual services. It is about sheer survival.” “Twenty-five years ago, three-quarters of male pros-titutes were German nationals. By now, immigrants make up about 90 percent of this population, many of whom come from Eastern Europe” | quoting AIDS assistance group KISS, Karin Fink |. Let’s stop being a Daydream Nation and face the problems we have | center right |.