Documented Violence, Not Folklore

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.