Witchcraft Accusations Today

People are being killed today after being accused of witchcraft or sorcery, and the killings are recorded by bodies whose business is documentation rather than anthropology.

In 2021 the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on the elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, the first time the subject was named as a human rights concern in its own right. UNICEF has published field research on children accused of witchcraft in central and west Africa, where accusation leads to beating, forced exorcism, expulsion from the family and abandonment on the street. The United Nations mandate on the rights of persons with albinism, created in 2015, documents mutilation and killing driven by beliefs about the value of body parts in charms, in parts of east and southern Africa. In Papua New Guinea, researchers and the government use the term sorcery accusation related violence for a pattern of torture and killing, most often of women. In India, the national crime statistics record murders under a witchcraft motive, and several states have passed specific anti witch-hunting legislation, including Jharkhand and Assam.

These are separate phenomena in separate societies with separate causes. What they share is that an accusation of occult harm becomes a licence to do violence to someone who cannot refuse it.

The people accused are, with striking consistency, the people least able to resist an accusation: older women, especially widows without sons; children, particularly orphans, stepchildren and those with disabilities; people with albinism; and people whose appearance or behaviour marks them out.

Research has repeatedly found material pressure underneath the accusation. A peer-reviewed study of rural Tanzania found that extreme rainfall, and the income shock that follows it, predicts the killing of women accused of witchcraft, with the elderly women in a household disproportionately the victims. Fieldwork on child accusations in central Africa has connected them to the strain on extended families from displacement, urban poverty, conflict and epidemic, which breaks the customary obligation to absorb another household's children. Land and inheritance appear again and again: an accusation against an elderly widow can also resolve a question about who holds her land.

That is not a claim that the accusers are cynics. People generally believe what they say. It is a claim that the belief becomes lethal under particular pressures and against particular people, and that those pressures can be identified and acted on.

The pattern is the same one visible in the European records. Anna Göldi lost a dispute with the household that employed her, and then something went wrong in that household.

This subject is written badly more often than almost any other in comparative religion, and the failures are predictable enough to name.

The first is treating it as folklore. An article that files present-day killings under traditional beliefs, beside harvest customs, has already decided that the dead are ethnographic material rather than people with a claim on the reader. The second is treating it as a survival, the last embers of something Europe went through and outgrew. It is not a survival; it is contemporary, with contemporary causes including urban poverty, displacement, conflict, weak policing and, in several documented cases, the commercial incentives of preachers who charge for deliverance. The third is exoticism, which supplies the lurid detail and omits the court records, the national commissions, the local campaigners and the domestic legislation, and so presents whole societies as helpless in a way they are not.

The fourth failure is the one this atlas has to watch in itself. Because it also holds modern Pagan witchcraft, there is a standing temptation to link the two. They must not be linked. Almost nobody killed as a witch today is a practitioner of anything, exactly as almost nobody executed in Europe was, and treating an accusation as evidence about the accused is the error that killed them.

Name the accusation, name who made it, name what was done, and cite the body that recorded it.