Eugenic and sexual folklores and the castration of sex offenders in the Netherlands (1938–1968)

This contribution questions the positive/negative eugenics dichotomy that typifies the historiography on the eugenic movement in the Netherlands and the claim that this movement was mostly marginal because only positive eugenics was pursued. From 1938 to 1968 in the Netherlands, after a decade of debates, 400 sex offenders who had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane were ‘voluntarily’ and ‘therapeutically’ castrated. For political reasons debates on castration, meant to create consensus, eliminated any reference to or connotation with eugenics, yet these policies were unthinkable without them. This article shows that thinking about social and sexual problems and their solutions in the 1930s were permeated by eugenic folklore which in turn was informed by sexual folklore. Both eugenic and sexual lore, as common sense, or as ways of knowing, were about individual and collective loss of self control which was referred to with a catch-all phrase: ‘hypersexuality’. Although sexual classifications used in diagnosing sex offenders suggested the existence of discrete sexual categories, homosexuality for instance was not seen as a sexual alternative or as an identity but as the extent to which an offender suffered from a form of hypersexuality that threatened the fabric of society.