On a robot, two young men and a girl in Cologne
I. A small case with a big question
On a Saturday night in October 2026, in Cologne, Germany, a red-and-gold robot touched a 16-year-old girl’s bottom and made thrusting movements towards her. It did not act alone. It was being handled by two young men, one aged 16 and the other 19, who filmed the scene, livestreamed it and commented on it online.
The police opened an investigation into possible sexual harassment. Their spokesman, Christoph Bermel, summed up the institutional bewilderment in a phrase the press turned into a headline: ‘new territory for us’. The two young men are suspects but have not been charged. Investigators want to establish something that seems technical but is not: whether the robot’s movements had been programmed in advance or whether someone was controlling them in real time.
This essay argues that the case is not new in substance, only in form. What happened in Cologne is harassment of the oldest kind: non-consensual touching in public, cheered on by a group. What is new is the machine placed in between, and it deserves a careful look. The robot performs three functions at once: it is instrument, alibi and spectacle. Each raises a different question about responsibility, the body and harm.
II. Instrument and alibi: who acts when a machine acts
A robot has no intentions. It does not desire, it does not mock, it does not choose whom to touch. What it has is a chain of human decisions behind it: someone bought it, someone programmed or operated it, someone steered it towards a group of women. The videos that circulated show exactly that: two young men escorting the robot, one of them shouting orders at it again and again.
That is why the investigators’ question, programmed or controlled live, matters less for moral responsibility than it might seem. If the movements were pre-programmed, someone designed them knowing what they did. If they were operated in real time, someone pressed the buttons while looking at the girl. Either way, the intention is human. The only thing that changes is the distance between the decision and the gesture.
This is where the robot’s second function comes in: the alibi. The machine allows one to say ‘it wasn’t me’ and, above all, ‘it was a joke’. It places a layer of play between the aggressor and what he does, like a costume or a puppet. The ventriloquist who insults someone through his dummy is still insulting them. But the dummy gives him permission to say what he would not otherwise say, and gives the audience permission to laugh.
Technology has a long history of this diffusion of responsibility. The algorithm that discriminates, the drone that fires, the self-driving car that runs someone over: in each, the question ‘who did it?’ dissolves among designers, operators and machines. The Cologne case is the crudest version of this problem. Here there is no real autonomy to obscure authorship; only the appearance of it. And even so, that appearance was enough to make the police hesitate.
III. The absent body: can one touch without touching?
The subtlest point in the case is a legal one, but it reveals something philosophical. The German Criminal Code punishes sexual harassment, defined in terms of someone who ‘physically touches’ another person in a sexual manner and thereby harasses them. That provision was introduced in 2016, partly in response to the mass assaults of a New Year’s Eve in, of all places, Cologne. Ten years later, the same city is testing the same law from an angle nobody foresaw.
The question is whether the touching must be done with one’s own body. The intuitive answer is no: nobody would say that someone who touches another person with a stick, a glove or an object has not touched them. The robot would simply be another tool, only more complex and further removed from the body of its user. Resistance to this answer comes from the distance and from the appearance of autonomy: the robot walks, turns, seems to decide.
But the victim’s experience does not depend on that debate. For her, something touched her sexually without her consent, in public, in front of a group that was laughing. The humiliation is not lessened because the hand was made of plastic. It may even be made worse: the robot turns her into the object of someone else’s game, the target of an experiment. Consent is violated all the same, whether the gesture comes from a hand or a motor.
This leads to a conclusion that goes beyond the case. Laws that define assault by contact with the aggressor’s body were written for a world without intermediaries. As more and more actions are carried out through machines, the law will have to define harm from the standpoint of the person who suffers it, not from the anatomy of the person who causes it.
IV. The spectacle: the audience as part of the harm
The robot’s third function is the most contemporary. The young men did not only harass: they livestreamed. The robot was not merely a tool for touching but a tool for producing content. A teenager who touches a girl in the street commits an assault; one who does so by means of an eye-catching robot and streams it manufactures a video that will circulate.
The harm therefore unfolds in two stages. The first is the act itself: a few seconds on a street in Cologne. The second is its circulation: the videos, the laughter of those watching, the comments on social media. The second lasts longer, reaches more people and cannot be withdrawn. The victim was not only touched; she was made the unwilling protagonist of a public joke.
That is why the police’s final warning is perhaps the most important part of the news. They criticised the inappropriate comments on Facebook and pointed out that sharing such incidents or joking about them worsens the impact on victims. It is a way of saying that the audience is not innocent. Whoever laughed in the street, whoever watched the stream and whoever shared the video take part, to varying degrees, in the same harm.
There is an uncomfortable paradox that this essay must also admit. The news report itself, and every piece that comments on it, prolongs the circulation of the event. The difference lies in where the gaze is directed. The video looks at the girl as the butt of the joke. Responsible commentary must look at those who made the joke.
V. What is really ‘new territory’?
It is worth separating what is new about the case from what is old. Almost everything is old: non-consensual touching, the choice of a young girl as a target, the group of males performing to be seen, the laughter of onlookers and the excuse of the joke. None of that requires a robot.
What is new is narrower, and for that reason more useful to think about:
- Physical mediation at a distance. For the first time, sexual touching has been carried out with a consumer device that walks on its own, rather than with an object held in the hand.
- Ambiguity of authorship. It must be established whether the gesture was programmed or operated live, and that question casts a shadow of doubt that did not exist before.
- The robot as attraction. The machine draws attention and creates a scene. What in any other context would be an obvious assault is presented as a technological demonstration.
The police’s bewilderment is explained by these three elements, not by the underlying act. And herein lies a risk. If the novelty of the form raises doubts about the seriousness of the substance, the technology will have served as an alibi even for the institutions. The robot will have fooled not only those laughing in the street but also those whose job it is to judge.
The case foreshadows a broader problem. Domestic and companion robots will become ever cheaper, more agile and more common in public spaces. Each one could become a borrowed arm for someone who does not want to use his own. The question is not whether there will be more cases like this, but whether we will be clear, before they arrive, that behind every gesture of a machine there is a human decision.
VI. A Christian reading: the heart, the excuse and the gaze
The Christian tradition offers a key that illuminates the whole case: evil is not born in the instrument but in the heart. Jesus says so plainly: ‘out of the heart come evil thoughts […], sexual immorality’ (Matthew 15:19). And he goes further when speaking of desire: everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent ‘has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ (Matthew 5:28). For the Gospel, the investigators’ question, programmed or controlled live, is not the decisive one. The wrong was already complete before the robot moved.
Nor is the technological alibi new to this tradition. In Genesis, the first sin is accompanied by the first shifting of blame. Adam says: ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me’; Eve replies: ‘The serpent deceived me’ (Genesis 3:12–13). The robot is a modern version of that serpent: something to point at so as not to have to say ‘it was me’.
Against objectification, Christianity affirms that every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) and that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). To touch someone as if they were a plaything is not only an offence against their will; it is an offence against that dignity. That the hand is made of plastic changes nothing: what is touched remains sacred.
The scene closest to this case is perhaps that of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11). A crowd exposes her in public to use her in its own game. Jesus refuses to look at her as a spectacle: he bends down, writes on the ground and turns the gaze back on her accusers. It is precisely the gesture this essay asks of the onlookers in Cologne and of those who shared the video: to stop looking at the victim and to look instead at those who turned her into an object.
Finally, there is something a Christian reading cannot leave out. One of the suspects is a minor, but that does not exempt him from responsibility. Christian justice is not exhausted by punishment: it also seeks for the wrongdoer to acknowledge his guilt, without serpents or robots, and to be converted. Calling things by their name is the first step towards that conversion.
VII. The hand that wasn’t there
In Cologne, the hand that touched the girl belonged to no one and, at the same time, belonged to someone. That is the whole difficulty of the case, and also its solution. The robot did not act: it was acted through. It was the tool that did the touching, the mask that turned it into a joke and the camera that turned it into a spectacle.
To call it ‘new territory’ is honest, because it names the lack of precedent. But it is also dangerous if the novelty of the instrument obscures the age-old nature of the gesture. What should guide the response, legal and social, is a simple idea: the distance a machine places between aggressor and victim diminishes neither the responsibility of the former nor the harm done to the latter. If anything, it reveals how much the aggressor wanted to avoid showing his face.
Source
Associated Press. (2026, 14 October). ‘“Un terreno nuevo para nosotros”: Policía alemana investiga presunto acoso sexual cometido por dos jóvenes con un robot’ [‘“New territory for us”: German police investigate alleged sexual harassment committed by two young men with a robot’]. Emol. https://www.emol.com/noticias/Tendencias/2026/10/14/1214103/investigan-alemania-acoso-sexual-robot.html
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), Anglicised edition, © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
