Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, are returning to Britain. We might think of witchcraft as a thing of the past; sadly, this isn’t the case. In multicultural Britain, folk practices like witchcraft and sorcery are more common than you might expect. Alongside the practice of witchcraft, there is also its opposite: accusations that others, particularly children, are witches, or demons, or possessed by spirits.
In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments flagged possible abuse linked to faith or belief, which includes witchcraft, and also things like spirit possession, and claims about the presence of demons or the devil. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments, according to official statistics. In London, the Metropolitan Police recorded 569 witchcraft accusations or cases of ritual abuse between 2021 and 2024.
An accusation of witchcraft does not just mean a false and malicious claim against a vulnerable person. It means what the jargon calls ‘faith-based abuse’. That could be as mild – as if anything like that is harmless to a child – as being accused of something that’s not true: harbouring devils, for instance, or being possessed by an evil force. But it can be much worse: attempted exorcisms are deeply unpleasant; they are loud and possibly violent. Children forced to go through such procedures often do not know what is happening to them, or what they are meant to do, to show they are cleansed of sin and free of demonic possession.
Because these practices are not true, children almost by definition cannot satisfy their accusers. How do you show adults who are certain you have an evil spirit in you that you do not? Perhaps they decide that the devil is tenacious, and has to be made to quit your body by compulsion. Sometimes these children are beaten and otherwise attacked. More than once, these children have died as a result of how they were treated.
A quarter of a century ago, Victoria Climbié was an eight-year-old girl from Abobo in the Cote D’Ivoire. She was brought to Britain by her family, supposedly to receive a better education. But in Britain, she was accused of witchcraft. Unable to defend herself, to convince her accusers that it was not true, she was tortured to death over months, in circumstances I do not want to tell you about. Her great aunt Marie-Thérèse Kouao and Kouao’s boyfriend, Carl John Manning, were convicted of her murder. They said that they believed Climbié was possessed, and that harsh treatment was the only cure.
Children who face such accusations are often victims of their families’ financial or personal troubles. As in the Middle Ages, in difficult times a scapegoat is sought and often found. Someone must be responsible for my ill health, the thinking goes; the child must be responsible for our money worries. It must be punished. It must have the evil spirit in it exorcised by ritual.
Most disturbingly of all, by the time of Climbié’s death on 25 February 2000, she had been contacted or otherwise connected with several arms of the British state, all of which failed to note her deterioration, her injuries, her malnutrition. None of them took her away from her abusers. None of them did a single thing for her. Only after her death, when the abusers were caught and tried, were some changes to child protection law in the wake of this dreadful case.
But the violence did not stop. The remains of a little boy, who was later tentatively identified as either Patrick Erhabor or Ikpomwosa, were recovered from the River Thames on 21 September 2001. Police investigations eventually decided that the boy (dubbed ‘Adam’ while his name was unknown) had been trafficked from Nigeria to Britain for ritual purposes. He was in Britain for little time, possibly only for a few days. The boy had been killed as part of a ceremony, and dismembered; his body disposed of in the river.
The film Kindoki Witch Boy, which was released this week, describes the story of Mardoche Yembi. He’s now in his early thirties, as Victoria Climbié would now be, had she lived. Yembi was himself accused of witchcraft when he was a boy in north London in the early 2000s. So seriously did his accusers take the claim, that Yembi suffered through – and luckily survived – three years of attempted exorcisms.
These are not practices you associate with modern Britain. Yet they’re here nonetheless. Films like Kindoki Witch Boy and the campaign around it do good in that they raise awareness. But what good is awareness of abhorrent practices if they continue?
The National FGM Centre itself is named for Female Genital Mutilation, something which is still distressingly common for British girls, despite supposed legal changes and even a few token prosecutions of the culprits. As many as 170,000 women and girls living in Britain were estimated in a parliamentary report to have undergone FGM; 65,000 girls aged 13 and under were considered ‘at risk’ of FGM.The state is fighting a losing battle against the practice.
The roots of these things are cultural, even geographic. And they have been imported into Britain with no end in sight.
Clarification: An earlier version of this article suggested that, in the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments have been linked to false accusations of witchcraft. It also said that, between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments connected to witchcraft, according to research carried out by the National FGM Centre. We are happy to clarify that these figures relate not only to false accusations of witchcraft but also to a broader definition of abuse ‘linked to faith or belief’. The piece also wrongly attributed these figures to the National FGM Centre. We are happy to clarify that the National FGM Centre is not the source of these numbers, which come from the Department for Education.
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