Criminologist Wouter Buikhuisen, bullied, waited for thirty years for honor recovery

For years, criminologist Wouter Buikhuisen opened the letters from Leiden University with hope for recapitulation. In vain, he tells in 2009 in an interview with University magazine Mare. For years, the scientist had been a victim of harassment and threats through his scientific research into biosocial factors in crime.

Last Tuesday, Buikhuisen died at the age of 91. Only the last 15 years of his life could the scientist enjoy appreciation for his vision.

The work of Buikhuisen as a criminologist put a focus on nature instead of nurtureto explain criminal behavior. He deviated from the spirit of the times of the 70s/80, in which a consensus had just arisen that environmental factors were all -determining. The scientist was labeled as a Nazicriminologist, and was forced to start a new life as an antique dealer on the Spanish Costa Blanca. Only in 2015 did he return to the Netherlands.

Affaire affair

Buikhuisens youth was signed by the Second World War. As a boy of 11, he was locked up with his mother and brother in a Japanese concentration camp on Java. His father was made as a forced laborer and died in the construction of the Burma railway line.

After the war, Buikhuisen returned to the Netherlands, where he obtained his PhD in 1965 thesis Backgrounds of nozem behavior. In it he introduced the concept of ‘provo’, derived from provocation. Buikhuisen was interested in the question of what the common groups of young people with anti-authoritarian ideas were rising at the time.

His conclusion: the young people experienced a lack of good leisure activities and therefore went looking for challenge in other ways. Within a year, the youth groups took over the term « provo » as a geuzen name.

Buikhuisen itself became professor of criminology at the University of Groningen and researcher at the Ministry of Justice. The real problems only started in 1978, when he became professor of criminology at Leiden University. He made it his mission to unite the social sciences with exact disciplines such as neuropsychology, endocrinology and psychophysiology.

Buikhuisen put his focus in particular on the amygdala, the part of the brain that influences the behavior. According to the professor, a good development of this brain part was crucial for behavior at a later age.

Load criticism

But when the professor submitted a research proposal in which he wanted to take a closer look at the role that heredity plays in criminal behavior, he received a load of criticism. Especially his implication that the nature of a criminal could be in the genes led to many negative reactions.

The criticism exceeded the academic world. The media picked it up and soon « the Bruinhuisen affair » arose. In particular, Hugo Brandt Corstius pulled the cart. Under the pseudonym Piet Gray he prescribed dozens of columns Free Netherlands in which he burned down the criminologist. Later, part of it was bundled to the book Belly house, stupid and bad.

Buikhuisen itself became the target of increasingly fierce harassment and threats. At an inaugural lecture in Leiden, demonstrators threw with a smoke bomb, shit was put in his letterbox and he received bomb reports. In the 1980s, the University of Leiden also completely lifted the criminology department and abandoned Buikhuisen his teaching qualification. On the advice of the doctor, he left the academic world and moved to Spain.

Only more than twenty years later the honor of the academic was restored. After a visit from the Rechtendan Carel Stolker, Leiden University reconciled with the scientist. The rather controversial vision of the scientist was overtaken over time, and his work was even praised several times by other criminologists.

Meanwhile, brain biological components are involved in studying criminal behavior by many researchers. « I knew: someday I get right. » said Buikhuisen in 2010 in an interview with Free Netherlands.

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