NETHERLANDS
The Daily Beast (United States)
Mar 22, 2012
Robert Chesal on how he and Joep Dohmen uncovered the Dutch castration scandal
For fifty years, Cornelius Rogge tried to tell the world this story. “People thought I was crazy,” he says. It was a story about a man he once knew who had been sexually abused by a Roman Catholic brother—and who was then castrated, when he dared to report the crime.
Rogge tried to tell journalists about it, but no one would listen. In 2010, he wrote his story in a letter to Wim Deetman, chairman of the commission that investigated sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church in the Netherlands. Still no action.
Then he contacted Joep Dohmen, a journalist from the Rotterdam-based newspaper NRC Handelsblad, the colleague who I worked with to break the story of Dutch church sex abuse back in 2010. Dohmen and I, working for our respective media but sharing information, uncovered a series of scandals in boarding schools and parishes that led hundreds of abuse victims to step forward and tell their story. Our work led the Dutch bishops to install a commission of inquiry that completed its work last December. When Rogge called Dohmen, that’s when things finally started to move.
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