Dutch women to appeal ruling in case against religious order

Nineteen Dutch women aged between 62 and 91 who took a legal action against the Sisters of the Good Shepherd for allegedly subjecting them to physical and mental abuse between 1951 and 1979 pledged at the weekend to appeal a ruling last week throwing out their case.

Some of the women were as young as 11 when they were taken “into care” by the nuns and forced to work in sewing rooms and laundries – the equivalent of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland – in what a Dutch Government investigation in 2019 said could be defined as “forced labour”.

The 19 who took the landmark case are just one group among roughly 15,000 women and girls who found themselves left to subsist with the order in the Netherlands between 1860 and 1973 – in a story often similar to others across Europe, Canada and Australia.

Over the years the Catholic congregation in the Netherlands has refused to engage with claimants on the basis that any legal action against them was time-barred.

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In this case the judges were asked to use their discretion to lift the statute of limitations and allow the full case to be aired on its merits.

A key argument for the lifting of the time-bar was that the women had been so deeply traumatised by their time at the five Good Shepherd homes in the Netherlands that they had lacked the confidence to act earlier. However, that changed after a newspaper report in 2018.

Seeking recognition would have been as difficult for many of these women as for Holocaust victims, psychology professor Paul Schnabel of Utrecht University told one of the first hearings.

“For most of their lives the Catholic Church held an inviolable position. They themselves lost their names, their clothes, their individuality. Only with revelations of widespread abuse by clergy did this spell begin to be broken.”

In its judgment, however, the court said that had the cases been brought individually rather than as a group, some of the women might have succeeded in having the statute of limitations lifted.

In the joint claim, however, there had not been enough information about the individual cases to warrant the removal of the time-bar overall.

In addition, the statements of the women had shown that the circumstances had been substantially different for each of them. There were differences from institution to institution. Not all had experienced their lives as negative. They were not therefore similar enough for a class action.

That being so, the court said it was not convinced that the regime at the Good Shepherd order had had the same consequences for all women between 1951 and 1979 – or that, as claimed, it had consciously traumatised the women in order to enforce compliance.