Guardian
**One of the comments I recently received pointed me toward the following article, so I felt it only fair to post it as a rebuttal to this post.
How media whipped up a racist witch-hunt
Despite the lurid headlines, police dismiss claims of child sacrifice
Ian Cobain and Vikram Dodd
Saturday June 25, 2005
The Guardian
The front-page headline leaping from the newsstands could not have been more clear: “Children sacrificed in London churches, say police”. At the same moment, the BBC was reporting that detectives trying to investigate the ritual murder of children accused of witchcraft were facing a “wall of silence”. Lord Stevens, the recently retired commissioner of the Metropolitan police, was weighing in to damn African churches, which he said were “obsessed by witchcraft, exorcism and evil spirits”.
Article continues
“We must”, Lord Stevens railed in a Sunday newspaper column, “stop this madness costing children’s lives.”
It looked, at a casual glance, like an open-and-shut case: Scotland Yard must have investigated the ritual abuse of African children, found that significant numbers of them had endured violent exorcisms, and uncovered evidence of children being trafficked into this country to be slaughtered.
Nothing is further from the truth. The police had conducted no such investigation, have scant evidence of ritual abuse of African children and - with the important exception of the young boy known as Adam, whose torso was found floating in the Thames four years ago - have seen nothing to suggest that any child has been sacrificed.
Media fascination with the “exorcism scandal” continued last week, however, reaching an almost hysterical pitch and leaving one police officer feeling he was “in the middle of a medieval witch-hunt”. Others wondered whether they were edging towards “another Orkneys” - an alleged child abuse scandal on the islands that never was.
The tumult was triggered by a leak to the BBC of a report examining attitudes towards child abuse among ethnic minorities in east London. The report had been commissioned by Scotland Yard after the official inquiry into the death five years ago of Victoria Climbié. Back then, the Yard hailed the research project as “an exciting and ground-breaking” attempt to discover more about the way in which cultural and religious values influence opinions about abuse. “It was intended to open a dialogue, to give us a list of perceptions,” a senior officer said last week. “It was not an investigation.”
After 10 months of research, Perdeep Gill, a social worker, and Mor Dioum, a Senegal-born civil rights worker, delivered their 85-page report earlier this month.
During a meeting with members of an African community, the researchers had learned of a belief that children were being abused during exorcism rituals at Pentecostal churches. Many such churches have sprung up in Britain’s inner cities in recent years, some taking over shops or small factories, others simply gathering in churchgoers’ living rooms.
Some pastors, according to people interviewed, were denouncing children in the congregation as witches, or declaring them to be possessed by demons, then forcing them into exorcisms in which they were starved and beaten, or had objects forced down their throats. At least one person is said to have told the researchers he had heard about children being smuggled into Britain to be sacrificed.
No evidence was offered to support these claims, and none was needed: Ms Gill and Mr Dioum had been asked to gauge beliefs, not establish facts, and the Yard believes there is no spate of ritual murders to investigate.
Shortly after the leak, however, came a flurry of media accounts of “a shocking Scotland Yard report” which was said to detail the way in which young African boys, “unblemished by circumcision”, were being smuggled through ports and airports to be slaughtered during the concoction of “powerful spells”. One BBC reporter described the report as “absolutely chilling”. The corporation says it stands fully behind its reporting.
Many newspapers, meanwhile, were reminding their readers that Scotland Yard had disclosed a few weeks earlier that 299 African boys had vanished from London school rolls.
Few mentioned that the police also said they were highlighting an administrative problem, and had no reason to believe any missing child, other than “Adam”, had come to any harm.
African church ministers and their congregations were outraged. “There is a lot of anger - we are taking a hit for something we are not engaged in,” said the Rev Nims Obunge, the minister of an evangelical church in north London.
Backlash
Lee Jasper, an adviser to London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, turned his fire on the police, accusing them of being responsible for “a very dangerous report” which was resulting in “a racist witch-hunt of African communities”.
Amid this backlash, senior officers decided not to publish the report, fearing that to do so would unleash more lurid reporting and burn more bridges to African communities.
Nevertheless, many at the Yard remain convinced that it was a worthwhile research project. Indeed, the evidence of a degree of superstition among some Africans in Britain is obvious to anyone who reads the Voice, the national black newspaper. Each week the paper carries up to two pages of display advertisements for self-styled marabouts and psychics, men like “Professor Ki Kee”, who offers help with “voodoo and witchcraft” from his council flat in Peckham, or “Professor Baraka”, who offers to assist “victims of black magic” from his house in Nottingham.
Nor is there any doubt that there has been a rapid growth in belief in child witches in some parts of Africa. Aid workers in Congo, in particular, say they are alarmed by the number of children accused of being witches who have been cast into the streets after denunciation by fundamentalist Protestant pastors.
Save the Children saw little evidence of this when it first established a large presence in Kinshasa, the capital, in 1994. But by 1999 it was so concerned that it conducted a survey, which showed that between 30% and 40% of the estimated 70,000 street children in just one area of the city had been abandoned by their families after being accused of witchcraft. The charity believes the phenomenon has grown steadily since.
“At the root of this problem is poverty, pure and simple,” a spokesman said. “This is a country that has been deeply traumatised by war, disease and corruption, and where many people cannot afford to look after all of their children. One of the few growth industries is Pentecostal churches, which are offering salvation after years of bloodshed.”
Too many pastors, he added, were encouraging a belief in child witches, and too many desperate parents were seizing upon a reason to have one less mouth to feed.
To date, however, just two “witchcraft” abuse cases have come before the British courts. Victoria Climbié, who was brought to London from the Ivory Coast by her aunt, suffered terrible abuse before being taken to a church in south London where the pastor decided that she was possessed. The beatings continued and she died soon afterwards.
Three people are awaiting sentence after being convicted this month of the abuse of an eight-year-old Angolan orphan. They starved the child, who can be identified only as Child B, struck and cut her, and rubbed chilli in her eyes in an attempt to drive out the “devil” within.
Richard Hoskins, an African religions specialist at King’s College London, who advises the police, said he was aware of seven other recent cases where social workers had intervened: five in London, one in the south-west of England and one in the north-west. All involved people from Congo, he said.
There is also the deeply disturbing case of Adam, whose torso was dragged from the water near Tower Bridge in London in September 2001. He was aged between four and seven when he died, probably when his throat was cut, and forensic scientists have pinpointed the area of Nigeria where he was raised. Nobody has yet been charged with his murder, but detectives are convinced he was the victim of a ritualistic killing.
Commander David Johnston, head of child protection at Scotland Yard, said the police were well aware that “African communities do not tolerate the abuse of children any more than any other community”. The Yard, he said, needed to know more about occasions when “issues of faith and culture, which are perfectly acceptable, may cross a boundary into becoming criminal abuse of children”. He also said that “like in any other community, there are some people who are intent on harming children”.
A seven-strong team of detectives under his command, in an operation named Project Violet, has been examining past child abuse cases to see whether any signs of ritualistic violence emerge from the files. While police say that ritual abuse, like all other forms of child abuse, is probably under-reported, Commander Johnston is convinced that such cases are “very rare”.
Exactly how rare may be demonstrated by the child abuse figures from just one London borough. Over the last two years, social workers in Haringey have come across two children suffering ritual abuse, including Child B. Over the same period they have been alerted to about 6,000 cases of children in need, of whom about 650 were children in high need of protection, many of them suffering serious physical or sexual abuse.
Mr Obunge said it was this that most angered his congregation - a huge amount of attention being paid to allegations, largely unproven, of a relatively small amount of abuse by African people. “And it isn’t gullible people who are to blame,” he said. “It’s a gullible press.”
