When you think of witchcraft trials, you’re almost certainly thinking of a bunch of Elizabethan Puritans in their funny hats, burning innocent women at the stake. After all, the West almost completely left witchcraft behind in the 17th century, with the rise of scientific Enlightenment. If we think of witchcraft at all in the modern West, we associate it with Hot Topic goth girls cosplaying at so-called ‘Wicca’.
But there is a very real and horrifying resurgence of witchcraft accusations, and brutal murders as a consequence, in the West. Like so many maladies plaguing the modern West, it’s entirely imported. Import the Third World, become the Third World.
In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments have been linked to false accusations of witchcraft. 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.
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 […]
More than once, these children have died as a result of how they were treated.
In all of that – and recall that the Spectator is supposed to be a conservative magazine – there’s not one word of exactly who is doing this horrific stuff. Take note of the names involved and draw your own conclusions.
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.
Poor little Victoria had about as much hope of being helped as a grooming gang victim. For the same reasons, it seems: an establishment whose only compass is avoiding accusations of ‘racism’.
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.
All the laws in the world count for nothing if those in authority refuse to prosecute them.
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 […]
These are not practices you associate with modern Britain.
But then, neither are ‘honour killings’, child rape gangs, female genital mutilation or widespread cousin marriage. These are all only prevalent in modern Britain thanks to the demented ideology of multiculturalism and a reckless obsession with mass Third World immigration.
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.
So name them. Africa and the Middle East. Primitive animism and Islam. These have all been imported into modern Britain.
And it’s children who are paying the price.
