A DUTCH NEWSPAPER report at the weekend which claimed that youths who complained about clerical sexual abuse in the 1950s were subjected to forced castrations has sparked calls for a parliamentary debate on the subject.
The NRC Handelsblad reported that at least a dozen children were subjected to the castrations to ‘cure them of homosexuality’ after they lodged sex abuse complaints.
It claimed that details about the castrations were provided to a recent major investigation into allegations of clerical abuse in the Netherlands, but that the Deetman inquiry’s final report did not mention them. It also found that there was not enough evidence to warrant further investigation.
The newspaper focused on the case of Henk Heithuis who was reportedly castrated in 1956 after he testified to police about child abuse at a Catholic boarding school. He was taken to a Catholic-run psychiatric hospital after giving evidence and was subsequently castrated.
Court papers report that Heithuis was castrated at his own request, but that there is no evidence of his written consent for the procedure, according to the Telegraph. It also reports that he was killed in a car crash in 1958.
Dutch MPs are expected to today call for a debate on the issues raised by the NRC Handelsblad and for a parliamentary investigation into the castration reports.
The Deetman inquiry into child abuse investigated allegations of child abuse dating back to 1945. It received 1,800 complaints of abuse at Catholic institutions. Of the 800 priests, monks or lay people working for the church who it identified as being named in the complaints, around 100 were still alive at the time of its report in December 2011.
Following a survey of 34,000 people, the inquiry estimated that one in every ten Dutch children had suffered some form of abuse, a figure it doubled when it came to children who had spent time in an institution regardless of whether it was a religious or secular institution.
The inquiry said that the likely number of victims lies somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people.
The Deetman report accused the institutions of a “failure of oversight” and said that abuse was able to continue because of the splintered nature of the Catholic church’s organisation in the Netherlands and the lack of a coordinated system to handle abuse cases. Instead, many cases were handled autonomously by bishops or religious orders.
- Additional reporting by the Associated Press
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say