Government and foundation awards line the walls of his office. Pedagogical books lie in a stack next to a silver Turkish tea samovar. A portable pedal exerciser sits underneath his desk on the floor.

Most of the men in his group sessions are not as worldly or as educated as he is. The younger ones work in menial jobs. Their fathers once toiled in factories. Few of them graduated from high school. Only a handful of them speak German fluently.

"Yes, I think the Turkish consul can help - we will ask him," Erdogan tells the man who seeks to halt the marrying off of the 13-year-old girl.

Statistics about Turkish domestic abuse are alarming. Earlier this year, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News published a survey that found 34 percent of men in Turkey find violence "occasionally necessary," while 28 percent said violence could be used to discipline women. After the Turkish government reported in 2009 that 42 percent of women surveyed said they had been victims of sexual or physical abuse by their husbands or partners, many said the true figure was much higher. The Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office last year established a special unit to fight violence against women. According to the Cihan News Agency, a total of 4,739 complaints were filed in its first seven months of operation.

These numbers factor in more liberal parts of Turkey, like Istanbul. But Erdogan and others fear the problem is even worse among more conservative-leaning members of Germany's Turkish diaspora.

While these statistics and attitudes may shock outsiders, Turkish immigrants in Germany -- such as Murat Tas -- understand the mentality that spawns abusers.

"We grew up in Eastern Anatolia hearing that when a woman makes a mistake, she is always wrong. That it's even okay to kill her," says Tas, 40, who was attending Erdogan's self-help group with his German girlfriend. "And some people in our community still believe this."

That this very group is considered a model -- one Erdogan hopes to replicate nationwide -- speaks to the difficulties some Turks face in assimilating into German society. Some of the men who attend regularly say they have always eschewed violence. Others admit they needed help to stop physically abusing their loved ones. Still others appear by order of the city's courts, which send Turkish and Arab men to the program as part of their probation sentences.

"I am here to work on myself, to see where everything went wrong," says a 32-year-old second-generation German-Turk who refused to be identified because of the stigma associated with violence against women. "I was drunk, and my girlfriend and I had a conflict, just once." The incident landed him in jail, he says.

When asked why he is not sitting with the other men in the room, he puts his head in his hands as if he might cry. But he doesn't cry. And that's just the problem: Erdogan wants to see tears. He wants these men to open up and acknowledge the pain they cause their families.