Updated September, 2020

I. Definition and Prevalence

Witchcraft refers to the supernatural presence of “negative occult or mystical forces.”[1] Supposedly practiced by witches to cause harm to others, it is feared and criminalized across the world under a variety of names, and may involve magic, shamanism, or traditional medicine.[2] Supernatural beliefs have sometimes played a positive role in contributing to development, but community members contend that such “good witchcraft” is largely “forgotten.”[3] Instead, the negative consequences abound. Specifically, societies that believe in witchcraft often link the random harms they suffer to the malicious intervention of alleged witches and respond with retaliatory violence.[4] As witches tend to be female, witch hunts are “essentially acts of violence against women.”[5]

Witchcraft-related violence toward women generally results from a confluence of factors: a community that believes in witchcraft; an unexplained calamity like a sudden illness; a woman scapegoated as a witch; and a group of people willing to attack her for it. This pattern, reinforced by gendered power dynamics, is what permits an ordinary night of socializing to devolve into a mob, dozens strong, advancing on an innocent woman’s house because of a single drunken accusation by a man with illness in the family.[6] And this cycle inevitably recurs because the alleged witch was not the cause of the underlying misfortune.

To Westerners, this problem may seem to live on the fringes. But in some countries, a belief in witchcraft is foundational. For example, in Vanuatu, survey respondents were far more concerned about being harmed by witches than being robbed, assaulted, or even murdered.[7] The majority of respondents in several countries, including Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, recently affirmed their belief in witchcraft.[8] In the Ivory Coast, as of 2010, the number was 95%.[9] This has real world implications for the women in those places.

When things go wrong, these supernatural beliefs and practices contribute to a culture of suspicion, persecution, and dysfunction among community members. A sociologist who spent months conducting interviews at a tea plantation in India plagued by witch hunts observed that “virtually everyone in the village is under the threat of being accused of being a witch when any unnatural event, either to humans or animals, takes place.”[10] Communities with entrenched supernatural beliefs (encouraged by local leaders or permissive, even participatory, governments) are quick to connect harms as varied as infant mortality, disease,[11] livestock death, and infertility[12] to witches’ work.

And when rumors spread about witches in the community, violence often follows—whether because of state-sanctioned prosecution and punishment, reactionary mobs, or a witch doctor’s orders. According to the United Nations (UN), global beliefs and practices involving witchcraft are the source of many “serious violations of human rights, including beatings, banishment, cutting of body parts, amputation of limbs, grave robberies, torture and murder.”[13] Additional forms of persecution include public humiliation, stoning, sex trafficking, rape, and execution.[14]

The cycle of witchcraft-motivated violence is highly gendered.[15] Men are usually the accusers.[16] Women are usually the accused.[17] In Papua New Guinea, for example, women accused of witchcraft outnumbered men six to one.[18] Although men can also be scapegoated, witchcraft-related violence is most likely to affect women. Particularly vulnerable subgroups include girls, elderly women, women with disabilities, and women with albinism.[19] A UN Independent Expert has described witchcraft as the “crux” of attacks on persons with albinism, noting this can even extend to mothers of persons with albinism.[20] Sometimes, communities will assign witch status to a certain household, and pass accusation—with the inherent potential for alienation and violence—from mother to daughter.[21]

Although the true extent of witchcraft-related violence is unknown, there are believed to be thousands of people who are persecuted because of witchcraft accusations each year worldwide. The Witchcraft and Human Rights Information Network identified cases in nearly fifty different countries in 2016.[22] Many of these cases turn deadly. In India alone, between 2000 and 2015, there were over 2,500 witchcraft-related homicides.[23] However, significant underreporting is likely because of how communities and authorities perceive witchcraft violence.[24] Even in places like Tanzania, where statistics on witchcraft violence are trending downward, the UN has cautioned that the decrease may be attributed to restrictions on media reporting, and not diminished violence.[25]

Witchcraft-related violence, once linked mainly to communities in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, is becoming an increasingly global phenomenon as immigration and globalization carry beliefs and practices into countries like the United Kingdom with less endemic witchcraft persecution.[26]  And countries like Saudi Arabia that crack down on witchcraft may be quick to brand the cultural or traditional items carried by foreign domestic workers—who are overwhelmingly female[27]—as tokens of witchcraft.[28] Such workers also need to worry about their employers counterclaiming with potentially fatal accusations of witchcraft when they try to assert basic rights to fair pay and treatment.[29]

II. Causes and Contributing Factors

Witchcraft accusations serve a scapegoating function, explaining away misfortune and focusing communal frustration on the witch.[30] Scapegoating in turn relies on stigmatization and othering, so that women perceived as different are particularly vulnerable. These women may stick out behaviorally, in that they are rebellious or nonconforming, or physically, in that they have hunched backs, darker skin, albinism, or other physical traits that distinguish them.[31]

Some also link witchcraft accusations to a “desire to control women,” particularly where women hold economic power.[32] Accusations often emerge in the context of personal conflicts and compound existing inequalities of gender and class. [33] Indeed, the men who persecute witches are often familiar with the women they accuse, frequently even related to them.[34] Scholars have suggested that women are more frequently scapegoated than men in witch persecution because traditional depictions of witches are often female and because women generally occupy inferior positions in social hierarchies.[35]

Governments may contribute to the problem by legitimizing witch persecution through laws that prohibit witchcraft or public enforcement bodies like Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit.[36] The Central African Republic, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vanuatu, for example, all criminalize witchcraft in statute.[37] The harms caused by the legitimization of witchcraft, compounded by the potential for discriminatory enforcement, outweigh any supposed benefits—like discouraging vigilante responses to perceived witchcraft.[38] Moreover, any witchcraft trial is fraught with evidentiary concerns, including permitting the testimony of witch doctors or admitting evidence based on confessions or reputation.[39]

To the extent cultural beliefs and practices regarding witchcraft contribute to violence against women, activists have noted these beliefs emerge from a “lack of education, governance, health and development, as well as poverty.”[40] Depictions in popular entertainment, like in Nigeria’s “Nollywood” film industry, also perpetuate these beliefs.[41]

III. Consequences

The cycle of witch persecution has a destabilizing effect on women and their communities. Even if nonviolent, witchcraft accusations can lead to the social marginalization and communal exclusion of the women accused.[42] And accusations tend to further disrupt communities already coping with the harms they pinned on witches in the first place. Families and friends turn on each other, depending on which way the accusations fly.[43] In places including India, men may deploy accusations strategically to dispossess women of their land and wealth, turning local communities against them.[44]Accused witches, particularly older women, may even be banished to witch camps.[45]

When persecution turns violent, women may be burned alive, beaten to death, stoned, or beheaded at the hands of an incensed mob.[46] Moreover, the supernatural character of witchcraft allegations means that women may be forced into dangerous “exorcism ceremonies” at the hands of community leaders or witch doctors.[47]

In places where the government prosecutes an alleged witch, legal processes nominally meant to ensure justice offer her little sanctuary.[48] When someone is indicted for killing an accused witch, studies have found that these defendants—usually men—tend to receive shorter sentences, and less serious charges, in witchcraft-related femicides than do average homicide defendants.[49]

If a woman accused of witchcraft is able, or compelled, she may attempt to flee and seek safety abroad. But women accused of witchcraft who try to claim asylum confront myriad obstacles because of how their claims are adjudicated. Foreign bodies often fail to recognize the scale of witch persecution in these refugees’ countries of origin. Generally, under international law, a woman seeking asylum must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution—based on either her race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group (PSG)—that her home country cannot protect her from.[50] Applicants fleeing persecution as witches often face special difficulties convincing Western tribunals that they belong to a credible, legitimate PSG related to witchcraft or that their experience involves religion.

A study of nearly two hundred recent asylum decisions by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand revealed a persistent pattern of authorities either not taking witchcraft-related harms seriously or writing them out of their decision-making process entirely.[51] With troubling frequency, “deeply embedded and unevidenced assumptions about witchcraft form[ed] the basis for disbelief of claims,” by authorities considering asylum cases.[52] Witchcraft claims are also sometimes erased entirely from authorities’ consideration in favor of more familiar persecution narratives. For example, at one refugee’s arrival interview, she talked about how her husband accused her of witchcraft and also threatened to have her circumcised. After she neglected to discuss the threat of female genital mutilation in a subsequent written statement that focused instead on her intense fear of being persecuted as a witch, the tribunal imparted its own view of which threat was more serious, viewed this omission as suspicious, and refused asylum.[53] This is only the tip of the iceberg. After all, “refugee decisions do not necessarily represent refugee experiences.”[54] Whether from within or outside their communities, witchcraft accusations undermine and endanger women.

IV. Responses

Official responses to witch persecution are complicated by the disparity between countries where a deep belief in witchcraft is at the heart of public life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the communities that dismiss witchcraft as a hoax. This divergence in views leads to significant disagreement over the nature of the problem, particularly in the international context.[55] While the people that believe in witchcraft have a right to their religious beliefs, the UN contends there is no place in a system of international human rights for those beliefs to lead to violent attacks against women.[56] A similar tension exists where witchcraft-related violence is encouraged by some practitioners of traditional medicine, particularly as this promotes the trade in body parts of persons with albinism.[57]

No international convention directly addresses witchcraft-motivated violence. However, several existing conventions may more broadly address the phenomenon, including the Refugee Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[58]

Witchcraft-related violence takes different forms in different cultures; the beliefs and practices that give rise to witch persecution vary across groups. This complicates efforts at cataloging the problem and formulating effective transnational responses. However, the UN contends that international human rights frameworks are adequate to respond to the violence inflicted based on witchcraft beliefs.[59] But human rights discourse can have little influence on the ground in communities that view accused witches as literally inhuman.[60] In these settings, accusers feel that their human rights are being deprived when accused witches walk free.

States may attempt to crack down on witch persecution through legislation criminalizing witchcraft accusation. Legislative solutions can be proactive, such as criminalizing witch allegations or empowering accused women to send cease and desist letters and get police involved in their cases. And solutions can be reactive, like assessing additional punishment for witchcraft-motivated killings.[61] However, these laws do little when underfunded or underenforced by indifferent authorities.[62] A host of factors contributes to the underutilization of these laws, including survivors being “discouraged from lodging complaints by their family or community or the police, inaccessibility of the justice system, police inaction and lack of diligence in following through with investigation and prosecution, and lack of witnesses prepared to testify owing to fear of reprisals.”[63] Prosecution patterns also tend to reflect gendered power imbalances, redressing harms to male accused witches more often than female ones.[64] In one case, four men armed with machetes barged into the home of a pregnant woman with albinism, saying “all they needed were her arms.”[65] The woman survived, but the lead attacker was later released from custody because authorities did not credit the woman’s identification—despite her knowing him as a neighbor for a decade.[66]

Traditional and customary leaders in the local community can also play important roles in mitigating witchcraft-related violence. Likewise, local NGOs do important work to protect and support women accused of witchcraft and combat the misconceptions that contribute to accusations in the first place.[67] Survivors of witchcraft accusations are also active in their communities in trying to counter these harmful practices.[68]

The report of the UN Human Rights Council’s 2017 expert workshop on witchcraft and human rights urged several recommendations for various international actors. For NGOs, these included funding research, keeping better records, raising awareness through education, working with religious leaders, pushing to amend legislation on witchcraft, and helping survivors return safely to society. For governments, the recommendations included reviewing and amending legislation on witchcraft to reflect human rights standards, working to “engage and empower” survivors, formulating country-level plans to eradicate witchcraft-related violence, banning media advertising related to witchcraft, retraining law enforcement, improving education to supplant supernatural beliefs about disease, and working with both religious and nonreligious organizations.

Many argue that law is an incomplete solution, and that permanently solving the problem of witchcraft-related violence against women requires a holistic approach to communal security and development, focused on improving “education, justice, health, economic injustice, and gender inequality” through initiatives like coordinating with community leaders, human rights education, displacing supernatural discourse with scientific explanation, and economic reforms meant to improve the position of women.[69] Education, activism, legislation, and sincere engagement with religious and cultural institutions can all work together to convince communities that witches are not to blame for their problems, thus breaking a critical link in the chain of witch persecution and helping women worldwide.