A recent act of violence has shocked Germany: a Deutsche Bahn employee was checking passengers on a regional train near the southwestern city of Kaiserslautern on Monday night when he encountered a man traveling alone without a valid ticket. When the train conductor asked the passenger to leave the train at the next stop, he was attacked and punched repeatedly.
The train conductor lost consciousness, had to be resuscitated and died a day later in a hospital from a brain hemorrhage as a result of blunt force trauma. The alleged perpetrator is now in custody.
Statistics show that last year alone, nearly 3,000 railway employees were attacked. According to the German Interior Ministry, an average of five employees were physically assaulted and four threatened every day. "I don't check tickets because I want to get home alive," a conductor told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
However, this threatening development is by no means new, violence researcher Jonas Rees told DW.
"We have seen a steady increase in violence since 2015. The new normal for at least the last 10 years has been that it is virtually part of everyday life for employees to be verbally abused, insulted, threatened, or even physically attacked," he said.
