Conspiracy or care? Excess mortality and institutionalised children in the Netherlands, 1860s–1960s

This research note explores excess mortality among institutionalised children and adolescents in the Netherlands from the 1860s to the 1960s, linking a recent case study of the Catholic Good Shepherd institution to broader, comparative questions in historical family demography. Public debates have increasingly framed mortality as definitive evidence of institutional violence, exemplified by the 2024 documentary De meisjes van de Goede Herder. Yet the underlying demographic analysis, while confirming excess mortality among both boarders and nuns, highlighted the limits of available sources and cautioned against drawing overly deterministic conclusions. This research note situates that case within a wider institutional landscape that included Protestant, Catholic and ‘neutral’ homes, and argues that mortality in these settings was shaped by shifting populations, evolving institutional regimes and historically contingent notions of death. Surveying institutional histories of neutral and Protestant reformatory homes, orphanages and post-war girls’ homes, the article shows that although sickness and death frequently appear in narrative sources, systematic mortality analysis is largely absent. This absence hinders our ability to determine whether Catholic institutions were exceptional or whether elevated mortality reflected broader structural risks inherent to institutional care: social selection of highly vulnerable children, exposure to infectious disease, overcrowding, limited medical resources and confessional interpretations that sometimes sacralised early death. The article outlines a research agenda for comparative institutional mortality studies, emphasising the need to integrate demographic reconstruction, life-course analysis, and qualitative contextual evidence. It argues that understanding excess mortality requires disentangling background vulnerability, institutional conditions and wider public health trends. Rather than reinforcing speculative interpretations, a comparative and methodologically rigorous approach can illuminate structural risks and institutional responsibilities, contributing to contemporary debates on care, accountability and the historical conditions under which children (and those who worked with them) faced heightened risks of death.