On April 29th at 9:10 p.m. on ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – Christoph Feurstein will present the following contributions in “Thema” on Monday, April 29, 2024, at 9:10 p.m. on ORF 2:
Criminal responsibility: children in prison?
Burglary, robbery, assault – when Beatrice Baumgartner committed these crimes, she was still a child. At the age of eleven she ran away from home and got on the wrong track. “If I had been locked up back then, I would have slipped completely,” says the now 39-year-old. She was picked up by her social worker Peter Sato, who has now accompanied 500 children into adulthood. “Every child who caused problems had big problems themselves beforehand,” he says of his experience. After a series of high-profile crimes committed by children and young people, lowering the age of criminal responsibility to twelve years is now being discussed. Can this be helpful in getting underage crime under control? The aim is to protect children and get criminals out of the system, says Interior Minister Gerhard Karner. Leon Hoffmann-Ostenhof and Eva Kordesch met a 16-year-old for “Thema” who was convicted of theft and aiding and abetting bodily harm.
Hard life – how fat people are discriminated against
“I don’t go out anymore because everyone looks better than me. Because I hate myself and my body so much,” says Elisabeth Marcinowski. At the age of six, her parents put her on a diet for the first time. Today she is still fat. Studies show:
Tolerance for fat people has decreased over the past 20 years. Discrimination has increased. “The worst thing of all is discrimination when it comes to doctors. For them we are lazy, undisciplined animals,” says Elisabeth Jäger. She was fat for eleven years of her life. That’s how long it took her to find a doctor who took her seriously and she was able to lose weight with a gastric bypass. But being fat is not always unhealthy. Around 30 percent are physically fit. “I am healthy,” says Elisabeth Marcinowski. She founded a gym where people of all weight classes can enjoy exercise. Leon Hoffmann-Ostenhof followed fat people with his camera for “Thema”.
Mountains of plastic waste – what ways out are there?
“Every little thing is packed two, three, four times. “It wasn’t like that before,” says pensioner Herbert Puchmayr from Haidershofen in the Mostviertel angrily. Like him, there is a mountain of plastic waste growing in almost every household. In Austria, 100 kilograms of plastic per person end up in the trash every year. Only a third can be recycled. The majority is burned. “We are happy when the plastic bottle deposit comes, because otherwise the mountain of garbage will keep getting bigger,” says garbage man Wolfgang Schaumüller, who has been in the job for many years. How do we get rid of the mountain of plastic waste? What can the global plastic agreement currently being negotiated in Canada achieve? “Thema” accompanies garbage collectors in Vienna and the Mostviertel in their work, asks consumers and shows the route our plastic takes as soon as it has landed properly in the yellow bin or bag. Gerhard Janser and Antonia Pawel are on the trail of plastic.