A man who allegedly held six of his children against their will on an isolated Dutch farm from birth beat them to drive out “bad spirits,” prosecutors said in court Tuesday.
Gerrit Jan van D., 67, subjected his kids — who were discovered on the remote farm in the village of Ruinerwold in October — to “very serious physical punishment” when he thought they had been made “unclean,” according to the Guardian.
One child was tied up by his hands and feet, while another was forced to spend an entire summer in a doghouse at the property, prosecutors said during the procedural hearing.
“The children all speak of very serious physical punishment if their father thought there was a ‘bad spirit’ in them. That happened from a very young age, 4 or 5 years,” they said, according to the news outlet.
The youngest six of nine children “lived in seclusion from birth, were kept indoors and had to be quiet so that no one would notice that they existed,” the prosecutors said.
They were discovered when the oldest son still living on the farm entered a local bar in a confused state and raised concerns about his siblings.
Police raided the farm and arrested Van D. and an Austrian man identified as 58-year-old Joseph B.
Van D., who was absent for medical reasons from the hearing in the town of Assen, is charged with depriving the children of their liberty from 2007 to 2019 and “punching, kicking and denying food and drink” to the six children.
He also is charged with sexually abusing two of the older three children.
“I feel like this is a witch hunt,” Joseph B., who also is charged with depriving the children of their liberty, said in court Tuesday. “I have a clear conscience … I have not robbed anyone of his freedom.”
The three oldest children were not allowed to talk about the existence of their siblings, said prosecutors, who cited diaries kept by the children in which they had spoken of their “conviction that contact with the outside world makes you ‘unclean’ and about ‘bad spirits’ that come into bodies.”
One of the children was separated from the rest of the family at the age of 12 and forced to stay in a nearby trailer, prosecutors said, adding that “after that he spent a whole summer in a doghouse in a shed.”
The three oldest children were permitted to go to school and the “exterior doors were not locked all those years,” prosecutors said, adding that there was still “unlawful deprivation of liberty for all these years — classically locked up at times, but in a less classic way at other times.”
“No physical lock is required on the door as evidence of unlawful deprivation of liberty or hostage-taking,” they said.