One of the most disturbing forms of Gender Based Violence which I have come across during my travels relates to sorcery related violence. This abhorrent practice quite literally sanctions witch hunts targeting women who are accused of practicing ‘witchcraft’ to facilitate the demise of other members of their communities. The cruelty involved here is difficult to describe as women are publicly submitted to extreme levels of violence including beatings, rape and such shaming techniques as being forced to walk naked through the streets of communities. Superstition and a lack of education have been blamed as motivating factors for such instances but researchers in India suggest another contributing element as the catalyst for abuses; this being a play at controlling independent and free thinking women.
To take it back one step it is important to understand what the practice of witch-hunting actually entails. Basically this act begins with a woman in a village being targeted as the reason for a misfortune of another, ie: a crop loss or a sudden death. This woman is usually one who belongs to a lower caste or marginalised in one way or another. In many instances she is single or a widow and thus not proscribing to the perceived rules of how she ‘should be living’ as associated with her gender. According to research conducted in the Eastern state of Jharkhand it isn’t superstition but gender and class discrimination which provides the catalyst for sorcery related violence. Those who have been accused of witchcraft often come from similar backgrounds; they are always female, poor, marginalised and of a low caste.
More often than not accusations of witchcraft are levelled against those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. These are always women who live on the fringes, the elderly, women with disabilities and widows. It seems that the easiest way to deal with a self-sustaining, free thinking and independent woman in these instances is to increase the stigma and taboo that she already faces through her pre-existing marginalisation. By labelling her witch her behaviour henceforth will be modified. Either she will die through a revenge act of some sort or being burnt at the stake after a public trial, or she will be forever ostracised by her community for simply being labelled as a potential witch in the first place.
The true motivation of abuses and killings are veiled under a perceived superstition. As identified in a Washington Post article “often a women is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances”. Such a statement providing more evidence to suggest that the main motivation for labelling a woman as a witch is to punish her for questioning social norms and living outside of rigid and harmful gender stereotypes and norms.
For most of us reading this is might seem bizarre that witch-hunts still occur in modern day industrialised countries. But let me reassure you that they do and it is a particularly dangerous threat for the advancement of women living in these contexts. It’s difficult to even explain the level of violence that these women are subjected to. I’ve heard horrific tales of women being sodomised, sexually violated with foreign objects, gang-raped, having their breasts cut off, their teeth broken and their bodies hacked away at. The spectacle of it all is even more disturbing as after a woman is labelled a witch she is ‘put on trial’ in front of entire communities. I write this within parentheses as a trial would allow her to attempt to defend herself. But in these instances she is just tormented further and subjected to more violence and vile verbal abuse.
As identified by the India Social Institute “by punishing those who are seen as wild, oppressors send a not-so-subtle message to women: docility and domesticity get rewarded; anything else gets punished.”
End. – Day 12.
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