I was at the police station, arguing with one officer after another about why they should go try to intervene and rescue a citizen of Papua New Guinea who was being tortured. They had lots of excuses and, like the white man I am, I was getting more and more frustrated.

This is the first blog in a series where our guest blogger for the coming weeks, Anton Lutz, will discuss with you his thoughts about the problem of Sorcery Accusation Related Violence (SARV) in PNG and what can be done to overcome it. Please keep returning to our site for more blog posts in the coming weeks!

The sub-Saharan region in Africa includes 46 of the 54 countries that make up the continent. While numerous cultural and political differences show variance between the sub-Saharan nations, many of them share a paranoid commonality: children are often accused of witchcraft. These sub-Saharan witchcraft accusations show that the fear of mystic powers is not a superstition of the past, but that it exists and is growing even in the 21st century.

“Many people kill women with this word” stated a survivor of a sorcery accusation. Hers was just one of many reports we have collected showing how accusations of sorcery make the lives of those accused and their families highly precarious. These accusations often do eventually lead to violence. Even more frequently, but less publicly, they lead to lives of constant fear, of persecution and displacement. Survivors report having to be guarded in their movements, confined to their houses, constantly looking over their shoulder, and afraid that even if they move to a completely different place, their story will eventually catch up with them. On 30 March this year, Gulf Governor Chris Haiveta correctly observed that violence is only the end result of sorcery accusations, and that there are other issues that also need to be addressed. One of the most significant of those issues is whether those who have been accused of sorcery can ever clear their names and resume their place in their community. If so, how?