Torture, burning, murder: just the tip of the iceberg in PNG
Speech by Miranda Forsyth
for the launch of Witch hunts in the 21st century: a human rights catastrophe - photography exhibition launch
03 July 2025
In my work as Director of the International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks I am regularly sent images of the most shocking and gruesome violence to women, related to witchcraft accusations.
The case of a young woman tortured in front of a group of men before being murdered in Papua New Guinea, which Amanda Hodge describes in her article, is significant not because it’s unusual but because it is all too common.
I am told about such cases on a depressingly regular basis, sometimes with, and sometimes without, video footage or photographs. Most cases involve an element of public torture and collective violence. Most are triggered by a death or sickness.
But frequent as these cases are, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Many, many more cases go unrecorded in any way.
Bodies are silently buried, or disposed of in rivers, or thrown down pit toilets. Survivors flee their communities and become refugees, constantly looking over their shoulder, worried about what will happen when their new neighbours learn about their history. The fact that an entire community often supports these kinds of attacks and the consequent fear of repercussions, means that cases are seldom reported to police, and even more infrequently result in a prosecution.
I have been working in the space of what is now called sorcery accusation related violence in Papua New Guinea since 2013. Over this time, I have sought to reveal and map the extreme human rights abuses associated with accusations of sorcery.
In one detailed mapping exercise, I recorded 1039 accusation incidents involving 1553 accused persons in four out of the 23 provinces (less than 2 million people) in PNG, over a four-year period. In total, 318 people, either died or survived serious harm during this period, just over half of whom were women.
This has been difficult work, but we have started to see some positive developments. Most government officials in PNG now accept that this happens on a regular basis and at scale.
PNG has also passed a holistic national action plan to address sorcery accusation related violence, and there are many activists and donor programs working in the area. Many use WhatsApp or other social media to network with local leaders and sympathetic police officers and each other.
And yet, the violence and the cases continue. Many police officers are apathetic, overwhelmed or on the side of the community. The national action plan has been desperately underfunded. The response is overwhelmingly reactive rather than preventive.
Through my work on sorcery accusation related violence in PNG I came to know about individuals and organisations around the world working on similar problems.
In 2021 the UN Human Rights Council passed the Resolution on the Elimination of Harmful practices related to Accusations of Witchcraft and Ritual Attacks which documented more than 20,000 cases of harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations in more than 60 countries over a 10 year period, between 2009 and 2019.
The resolution formally recognised at an international level the scale of the problem for the first time and highlighted the urgent need for governments across the world to take action.
But it is just the start of the journey, rather than the end.
Miranda Forsyth is the Director of the International Network Against Witchcraft Accusations and Ritual Attacks.
This article is an edited version of a speech she gave at the the exhibition ‘Witch Hunts in the 21st Century: A Human Rights Catastrophe’. The full speech can be viewed and listened to below.