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| Bill Bragg |
By MITCH HOROWITZ - JULY 4, 2014
Most people believe that the persecution of
“witches” reached its height in the early 1690s with the trials in Salem, Mass.,
but it is a grim paradox of 21st-century life that violence against people
accused of sorcery is very much still with us. Far from fading away, thanks to
digital interconnectedness and economic development, witch hunting has become a
growing, global problem.
In recent years, there has been a spate of attacks
against people accused of witchcraft in Africa, the Pacific and Latin America,
and even among immigrant communities in the United States and Western Europe.
Researchers with United Nations refugee and human rights agencies have estimated
the
murders of supposed witches as numbering in the thousands each year, while
beatings and banishments could run into the millions. “This is becoming an
international problem — it is a form of persecution and violence that is
spreading around the globe,” Jeff Crisp, an official with the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, told
a panel in 2009, the last year in which an international body studied the
full dimensions of the problem. A report that year from the same
agency and a Unicef study
in 2010 both found a rise, especially in Africa, of violence and child abuse
linked to witchcraft accusations.
More recent media reports suggest a disturbing pattern
of mutilation and murder. Last year, a mob in Papua New Guinea burned
alive a young mother, Kepari Leniata, 20, who was suspected of sorcery. This
highly publicized case followed
a series of instances over recent years of lethal group violence against
women and men accused of witchcraft.
“These are becoming all too common in certain parts of
the country,” said
the prime minister, Peter O’Neill. Last year, Papua New Guinea finally repealed a 1971 law that
permitted attackers to cite intent to combat witchcraft as a legal defense. But
progress is slow. Although the police charged a man and woman in connection with
the 2013 killing of Ms. Leniata, no one has faced trial, a fact that drew
protest from Amnesty International in February.
One of the ugliest aspects of these crimes is their
brutality. Victims are often burned alive, as in Ms. Leniata’s case and a 2012
case
in Nepal; or accused women are sometimes beaten to death, as
occurred in the Colombian town of Santa Barbara in 2012; or the victims may
be stoned or beheaded, as has been reported
in Indonesia and sub-Saharan Africa.
It is tempting to point to poverty in the developing
world, as well as scapegoating, as the chief causes of anti-witch attacks — and
such forces are undoubtedly at work. But while Africa and the southwestern
Pacific have a long history of economic misery, much of this violence,
especially against children, has worsened since 2000. The surge suggests forces
other than economic resentment or ancient superstition.
In some communities, it is chiefly young men who take on
the role of witch hunters, suggesting that they may see it as a way to earn
prestige by cleansing undesirables and enforcing social mores. That many of the
self-appointed witch hunters are men highlights another baleful aspect of the
phenomenon: The majority of victims are women. The Rev. Jack Urame of the
Melanesian Institute, a Papua New Guinean human rights agency, estimates
that witchcraft-related violence there is directed 5 to 1 against women,
suggesting that witchcraft accusations are used to cloak gender-based
violence.
Another factor, particularly in Central Africa and its
diaspora communities, is the advent of revivalist churches, in which self-styled
pastor-prophets rail against witchery and demon possession. They often claim to
specialize in the casting out of evil spirits, sometimes charging for the
service. Many of those congregations have emerged from Western evangelizing
efforts.
One of Nigeria’s most popular Pentecostal preachers, Helen Ukpabio,
wrote that “if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is
always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.” As
that implies, children in those communities are especially likely to be
identified as possessed. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights reported
that most of the 25,000 to 50,000 children who live on the streets of Kinshasa,
the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, were abandoned by family
members who accused them of witchcraft or demonic possession.
The etiology of this epidemic is complex, but human
rights observers point to overpopulation, rapid urbanization and the hardship of
parents forced to relocate to seek work, as well as the sheer stresses of
raising children amid dire poverty. Superstitions are stoked by local “healers,”
who charge parents to exorcise evil spirits.
Witch hunting is far from limited, however, to acts of
sadistic vigilantism or profiteering. Some legal systems even sanction the
killing of accused witches.
In 2011, courts in Saudi Arabia sentenced
a man and a woman, in separate cases, to beheading after convictions for
sorcery. In 2013, Saudi courts sentenced
two Asian housemaids to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison on charges of
casting spells against their employers.
A Lebanese television psychic, Ali Hussain Sibat, was
arrested in 2008, while on pilgrimage to Medina, by the Saudi religious police
for hosting a television show in his native Lebanon, “The Hidden,” where he
would make predictions and prescribe love potions and spells. After an outcry by
Amnesty International and others, the Saudi courts stayed Mr. Sibat’s execution
by beheading, but sentenced him in 2010 to a 15-year prison term.
As in Africa, the wave of anti-witch activity in Saudi
Arabia is fairly new. The Saudi religious police devised an Anti-Witchcraft
Unit in 2009, resulting in the arrests of 215 alleged “conjurers” in 2012.
Some observers attribute this sudden interest in witchery to the royal family’s
attempts to appease its religious inquisitors by keeping them busy targeting a
handful of vulnerable individuals.
A final motive driving modern witch hunting may be more
venal than spiritual: The police in Indonesia, where there were about 100
suspected witch killings in 2000, point
to fraud and graft directed against vulnerable women, who, lacking family or
community protection, fall prey to banishment or murder on slim pretexts, while
their homes and property are seized by their accusers.
Globalization means that paranoia over black magic and
spirit possession are no longer confined to developing nations. Mass migration
has made this a pervasive problem. In January, a Queens, N.Y., man was
arrested for beating to death with a hammer his girlfriend, Estrella
Castaneda, 56, and her daughter, Lina Castaneda, 25; Carlos Alberto Amarillo
told the police that the women were “witches,” who had been “performing voodoo
and casting spells” on him. (Voodoo, more properly known as Vodou, is an
authentic Afro-Caribbean faith based in deity worship and ritual, practiced in
New York and many American cities. Other belief systems that retain or reinvent
ancient nature worship and spell practices sometimes go under the names of Wicca
or neo-paganism.)
It has not been confirmed whether the Queens victims had
ties to Vodou (neither they nor the suspect were Afro-Caribbean). Accusations
like those made by Mr. Amarillo, who is under psychiatric evaluation, often
prove unreliable or are misreported in a sensationalist way. But the theme has
nonetheless become alarmingly familiar in Western news coverage.
In 2012, The Guardian reported
that London police had during the last decade investigated 81 cases of “ritual
abuse” of children accused of possession or witchcraft, a phenomenon that
British social agencies fear
is on the rise, particularly within African immigrant communities. In 2010,
a 15-year-old boy, Kristy
Bamu, was tortured and killed in East London by his older sister and her
boyfriend, both Congolese, who had accused him of sorcery after he wet his bed.
In the wake of that case, the British police started to receive special
training on witchcraft-related abuse.
Because anti-witch violence is rooted in the belief
systems of traditional societies, it would be easy to slip into the fatalistic
view that this crisis is a tragic repetition of ancient aggressions. But where
local superstitions explode into violence or migrate across a wide range of
settings and societies, we can and must act.
Western branches of Pentecostal and charismatic
Christian congregations must work closely with the more fervent ministries of
their denominations among African and immigrant communities to foster an
understanding of how “exorcisms” can spiral into deadly abuse. No African
congregation wants to feel dictated to by the West, but there is a place for
exchange and cultural pressure. Western ecclesiastical bodies can specifically
enact prohibitions against for-profit exorcisms.
Laws should be enacted against accusing children of
witchcraft throughout the countries of Africa and the southwestern Pacific, as
one Nigerian state has
already done. And countries like the Solomon Islands that still criminalize
witchcraft should strike down those statutes.
Police indifference to crimes of witch hunting must also
be tackled, especially in societies where police officers themselves may share
in traditional beliefs about “black magic.” A 2012 British government report
on combating faith-based violence against children provides a valuable guide to
instructing the police on signs of abuse, asking religious leaders to condemn
violence and protecting vulnerable witnesses.
Legal efforts must be paired with increased social
awareness. In a promising model, a 2010 Oxfam International report
noted that some Catholic parishes in Papua New Guinea have been teaching
congregants about the natural causes of death and illness (common triggers for
anti-witch paranoia), providing shelter to accused witches and denying the
sacraments to those who accuse others of sorcery.
Crucial, too, is that the United Nations and
international human rights organizations start compiling yearly statistics on
these crimes. We’re severely hampered in understanding the scale of this crisis
when our most recent global data are already five years out of date.
Most important, witchcraft-related violence should be
branded as hate crimes by international courts and by all jurisdictions where
anti-hate statutes exist. This is vital to gaining wider recognition of this
criminality and preventing it.
In too many places, the accusation of witchcraft has
become an incitement to mob violence. It is time to lay the ghosts of Salem to
rest.
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