Witch Children of Nigeria

I have a new guest post at Young Australian Skeptics about the child witches of Nigeria.

As many will have seen, about a year ago, Channel 4 in the UK screened a very disturbing documentary about an epidemic in Nigeria of children being branded as witches. Here’s the original documentary. Basically, a spike in evangelical and charismatic Christianity in Nigeria, coupled with a film released by Helen Ukpabio, has resulted in a great surge of witch accusations. Wanting to find out more about the film that was supposed to have influenced this, I found the first 9 minutes of The End of the Wicked on YouTube as well. Here it is, I’ll discuss it a bit later in the post:

Accusations are typically made by pastors who demand exorcisms which can cost parents months of their wages. The accusations enter a society where belief in witchcraft is extremely widespread and children are accused of causing all sorts of calamities, such as family deaths and financial troubles. Children have been beaten, tied up, denied food, burned, cut, stabbed, burnt with acid or simply murdered by their parents as a result of such accusations. Over 10,000 have been abandoned, kicked out onto the streets where they are prone to disease, malnutrition and starvation, gangs and sexual slavery. Make no mistake about it, if you have a naturalistic worldview, this may be as close to pure unadulterated oozing evil you’ll get.

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