A press release from Leo Igwe, who recently featured on the UK Channel 4 documentary Return to Africa’s Witch Children as a supporter of children who have been stigmatized as witches by evangelists in Nigeria: Reason, Justice and Human Rights Will Prevail A Press Statement For Immediate release I have been informed that Helen Ukpabio of the […]
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Channel 4 television in the UK has just broadcast a new documentary about children accused of being witches in Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, as a follow-up to the programme on the subject that went out a year ago (which I blogged here). There’s some good news: it is now a crime to accuse a child of witchcraft […]
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The Justice Gap has today published two opposing articles on Harvey Proctor’s recent press conference, by Peter Garsden and Matthew Scott. Garsden takes the view that Proctor ought not to be “attempting to manipulate the press and public into believing that he is innocent in advance of any criminal charges”, whereas Matthew argues that “that would be […]
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From Jennifer LeClaire, news editor at Charisma News: It started a little later than usual, but spiritual witchcraft is rising—and rising rapidly—in South Florida this October. My community is home to a large population of witches, pagans, Wiccans and other heathens who practice one form of witchcraft or another. Your community may not have palm trees and […]
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The BBC reports: The Home Office is facing calls to explain why a 1980s dossier about alleged paedophiles at Westminster was “not retained or destroyed”. The document was handed to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens. Lord Brittan passed concerns in it to the relevant authorities, but the file itself was […]
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Channel 4 News has the latest on Helen Ukpabio: A controversial Evangelical Christian and “witch hunter” arrives in the UK in the hope of performing exorcisms on children. But in Nigeria witch scares have resulted in violence, torture and death. The founder of the bizarre Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries has been accused of exploiting superstitious […]
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BBC Three has broadcast a documentary entitled Branded a Witch, in which young British mother of Congolese heritage named Kevani Kanda visited Congo to see the consequences of child-witch accusations in the country. The statistics are grim: 50,000 children held in churches for abusive “deliverance” sessions, and 20,000 living in the streets after being thrown out by […]
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Staying with the subject of child-witches, Al Jazeera recently ran a documentary in its People and Power strand on children accused of witchcraft in Benin. While many of the cases of child-witch stigmatisation I’ve blogged about, mainly from Nigeria and Congo (and spilling into the UK), can be traced back to the teachings of powerful […]
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Following CNN’s three-part series on child-witch stigmatisation in Akwa Ibom in Nigeria (see here, here, and here), State Governor Godswill Akpabio has now been given right of reply on the channel in an interview with Becky Anderson: He said he signed a bill into law in 2008 that makes it a criminal offense, punishable by […]
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CNN’s Connect the World is broadcasting a three-part series on child-witch stigmatisation; as with other reports on the subject (most notably the documentaries for Channel 4 I blogged on here and here), there are depressing and poignant scenes of battered and bewildered homeless children who have been cast out by their families in Nigeria, thanks to pastors who […]
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