The Dutch government has promised to investigate "very serious and shocking" allegations that hundreds of teenage boys and young men were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church as a treatment for homosexuality in the 1950s.
Ivo Opstelten, the Dutch justice minister, told MPs that he would investigate the involvement of the police or the health authorities in alleged cases.
"We will get to the bottom of it to the extent the government is concerned," he said.
The investigation follows reports that young men under the age of 21 were surgically castrated "to get rid of homosexuality" while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church.
According to Dutch social historians at least 400 men were castrated in the post-war period up until 1968, over 40 per cent were classed homosexuals.
One Dutch psychiatrist with close links to the Catholic Church was known as the "the castrator of the Netherlands".
"It was nothing unusual," Marnix Koolhaas, a Dutch historian, told the Volkskrant newspaper.
One man has been identified as Henk Heithuis who was castrated in 1956, while a minor, after reporting priests to the police for abusing him in a Catholic boarding home.
He had accused Catholic priests of sexually abusing him in his Church run care home. Two clergymen were convicted of abuse but Mr Heithuis was nonetheless transferred by police to a Catholic psychiatric hospital were he was castrated.
Evidence of the castration policy has emerged amid controversy that it was not included in the findings of an official investigation into sexual abuse within the church last year.
Khadija Arib, a Dutch Labour MP, who called for the new investigation, said: "We must find out how many cases there were."
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