Dutch Mps All for Debate on Castration Claims

Calgary Herald
March 20, 2012

www.calgaryherald.com/news/Dutch+debate+castration+claims/6328058/story.html

Dutch lawmakers have called for a parliamentary debate after a media report that local Catholics castrated children in the 1950s to "cure" homosexuality, a party spokeswoman said Monday.

The call followed an NRC Han-delsblad newspaper investigation published Saturday that said at least a dozen children were castrated to "cure them of their sexual orientation."

It focused on the case of a man named Henk Hethuis who, it said, was castrated by priests in 1956 after testifying in a police investigation about child abuse in a Catholic boarding school.

After he testified, Hethuis was taken to a Catholic psychiatric institution and was "castrated because of his homosexual behaviour," the paper said.

A commission set up to probe sex-abuse claims from 1945 to the present last year found that tens of thousands of children were sexually abused within the Roman Catholic Church in the Netherlands.

But Hethuis's case, reported by 79-year-old Cornelius Rogge, was never investigated as the Deetman Commission "found too few connection points for a further investigation" into castration claims.

"More abuse seems to have taken place which has not been put into the report of the (Deetman) com-mission," Laura Huisman, a spokes-woman for Premier Mark Rutte's Party for Freedom and Democracy said.

"We want a session and debate as soon as possible to find out why this investigation was not done," she said.