A total of 19 Dutch women who took the religious order Sisters of the Good Shepherd to court for exploiting them between 1951 and 1979 by forcing them to work in laundries have been denied compensation because their cases are too old.

Girls as young as 11 who were deemed unruly or came from troubled families were placed in one of five De Goede Herder homes by child protection services where they were put to work in the laundry or as seamstresses.

One of the women described her time there as ‘being in prison’ and said the work, for which she was not paid, was so demanding she frequently fainted.

The women, now aged between 62 and 91, asked the court to wave the time bar on their cases because, they claimed, they had been ‘too traumatised’ to take action sooner.  They got together to make the claim following a publication about the convent practices in the NRC in 2018.

The judge acknowledged in his ruling that the women were treated ‘in a way that would not be appropriate today’ and had suffered psychological damage. However, he said, the time bar had to stand because their treatment at the hands of the nuns had been the subject of a television broadcast as early as 2003.

Lawyers for the order argued that at the time, the work was thought to give the girls ‘discipline’ and a better perspective for later life. ‘The Sisters of the Good Shepherd felt they were preventing these girls from ending up in the streets,’ the lawyers said.

Forced labour

A government investigation published in 2019 found that the work the girls did could be defined as ‘forced labour’.

The court also said that it could not be proven that all girls who spent time at the homes had been ‘traumatised on purpose by the nuns to make them more tractable’, as the women claimed.

Had the cases been brought individually, the women might have had a chance of the time bar being lifted, the judge said in his ruling. However, in the joint claim, there was not enough information about individual cases to warrant this.

One of the women in the case, 73-year-old Mary Lux-Spitters, said the women would appeal. ‘It’s not about the money, we just want recognition for what has been done to us. Our childhood was wrecked. We ended up being traumatised,’ she told local broadcaster Omroep Brabant.

NRC report

The NRC said in 2018 that in the Netherlands at least 15,000 young girls and women were forced to work in the laundries and sewing rooms of the Catholic order between 1860 and 1973.

The sisters of the Good Shepherd had homes all over Europe, Canada and Australia where girls were forced to work, with some of the most notorious abuse taking place in the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.

An investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church in the Netherlands in 2010 and, more specifically, violence against underage women in 2013, failed to include the homes.