ABSTRACT
On 3 June 2005 at the Old Bailey, two women and a man, all from Angola, were convicted of cruelty to an eight-year-old girl. 1 The child was in the care of one of them, a woman who claimed to be her mother, although DNA tests subsequently revealed her to be a more distant relative. The household contained another woman, not apparently related, and her son. The victim (referred to throughout as Child B to maintain her anonymity) had been accused of being a witch, initially by the child of the other woman. She was grossly abused by the adults and only saved from death by drowning by the boyfriend of one of the women who argued that the British Police would doubtless find out who had killed her. The maltreatment: starvation, beatings, cuts made on her chest and chilli pepper 2 rubbed in her eyes, were attempts, it was alleged, to force the devil responsible for her witchcraft to leave her body. This was the first time such beliefs and practices had been made public in the British press, although some five years earlier a girl of a similar age, Victoria Climbié, had had a deliverance ritual 3 performed for her by the pastor of the church she had attended and had subsequently died at the hands of the woman she lived with, also a distant relative. In the case of Victoria Climbié, the allegations of witchcraft or possession by demons were downplayed in the press accounts; in 2005 they were the central focus. By 2006, when Eleanor Stobart's report for the Department for Education and Skills was published, the existence of many more similar cases was revealed. In 2005 there had been some 18 cases in which children had been abused as a result of their having been considered to be possessed by an evil spirit or to be engaging in witchcraft against their accusers. This was nearly half the total number of cases studied by Stobart, who wrote that: ‘even at the time of writing other cases are coming to light’ (Stobart, 2006: 3).
