Britain’s anti-slavery commissioner is examining radical new plans to prosecute sex traffickers by “reversing” the juju spells that terrorise many of their victims into staying silent… Kevin Hyland, …

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Anti-Vampire Mania (1600-1755)

That the dead might harm the living is probably one of our oldest fears. Death is not simple for an animal that can both think abstractly, form complex religious ideas and engage emotionally with the loss of a loved one. What archaeologists call ‘deviant’ or unusual burials occur throughout human prehistory, such as the 12,000 year old Natufian Hilazon Tachtit grave, where a ‘shaman’ had heavy stones placed over their limbs, perhaps to stop them reanimating and returning. Vampires though are a specific being, related of course to all the demonic nocturnal creatures that engage with the dead and human blood in human culture, but one which comes from Eastern Europe around the mid-17th century. The Serbian word vampir has some parallel across most Slavic and Turkic languages, and possibly originated with the upiór myth from the Kipchak-Cuman migrations across the Eurasian steppe, or from the Slavic strzyga folklore demon. Other similar creatures include the Norse draugr, the Indian pishacha and the Greco-Roman strix.

To be sure that a dead body did not reanimate and return to attack the living, it is safer to burn them. At least one explanation for the progressive growth in anti-vampiric fear across Europe was the switch from a pagan cremation to Christian burial:

People probably started using anti-vampire practices when inhumation was introduced in Christian times. The inhumation ritual, characteristic of Christianity, resulted in uncertainty about what would happen to the spirit of the dead person (Żydok 2004; Barber 2010). Therefore, the cultural change associated with a belief in the further existence of the spirit after death made the fear of dead people more intense and led to the use of practices that were aimed at protecting the living against the dead. Cremation was practiced on Polish lands during pre-Christian periods, called Roman influence period and Migration period, and even in the beginning of medieval times, though no anti-vampire graves were practiced. Inhumation was introduced in the Middle Ages, and this is also the time when anti-vampire burials appeared on Polish lands (Żydok 2004). Anti-vampire practices may have been ‘the result of the clash of native Slavic culture with Christian culture’

-A multidisciplinary study of anti-vampire burials from early medieval Culmen, Poland (2021) Matczak et al.

The core area which became synonymous with vampirism during the 18th century, the height of the European craze for vampires, ran from Poland to Greece. Hungary and Transylvania in particular were perceived as central regions, a kind of vampire-heartland, although in reality the fear of vampires was much wider.

The Slavic strzyga was a person believed to be born with two souls, only one of which was baptised by a priest. When the person died, the second soul would remain on Earth to cause trouble, primarily by animating the person’s corpse, leaving the grave and killing people or animals. Of course rural folklore like this is not a consistent creed, but is rather an overlapping and morphing series of ideas and fears. People wrongly buried alive during epidemics might genuinely climb out of the grave, and quiet nights in graveyards might be startled by the noises of decomposition underground. But we also have the terror of the dark, the forest, the traveler on a nighttime road, we have the agony of childhood mortality, failure to thrive or the persistent illnesses of the time, we have owls, bats, nocturnal things which could be malicious and sinister. All combine into rich lores of demonic beings which attack when the sun goes down.

The first reports of vampires-proper emerge in 1591 (Silesia), 1618 (Bohemia) and 1624 (Kraków). These had in common the resurrection of dead men who had passed in an unnatural way - suicide, unbaptised or excommunicated. To stop them hurting locals and their livestock they were dug up and decapitated, burnt or stabbed with a sharp pole. In 1706 the first book on the subject was published, De magia postuma, by Karl Ferdinand Scherz, which informed readers of similar cases in Moravia. By 1709 Hungarian doctors were documenting cases of vampires being exhumed and impaled in Transylvania, and soon the reports turned into an outright panic. Cases with named individuals now arrive to us in

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Marrying the dead, whether by legal fiction or physically exhuming a corpse to stand at a ceremony, is just one half of the spirit spouse phenomenon. We now turn to the more ephemeral and unsettling realities, where people engage in relationships and sexual activity with a spirit, or a ghost, or a demon. For European readers familiar with elements of late medieval or early modern Christianity, there are parallels here with the incubi and succubi. Similar creatures or malevolent beings are staples of folklore all over the world, generally manifesting as a shapeshifter or violent and ugly spirit who sexually assaults and rapes both men and women: the tikoloshe of Zimbabwe; the Swahilian Popobawa; the Chilean Trauco and so on. For this article we’ll explore a few lesser known examples where such relationships are consensual, to some degree, rather than involving a named being. We start with the Yoruban spirit husbands, then look at Afro-Brazilian demon spouses, and end with Siberian shamanic beliefs in spirit spouses.

Yoruban Spirit-Husbands

“During sleep the spirit seems to desert the body, and as in dreams we visit other localities and even other worlds, living as it were, a separate and different life, the two phenomena are not unnaturally regarded as complements of one another…”

This quote from Sir John Lubbock, the esteemed archaeologist and anthropologist, helps explain the basic dualism found among almost all peoples - that there is a world of the living and awake, and another, which connects to the dead and the invisible. What Lubbock does not explain though, is how someone could engage in romance and even sexual activity with a spouse who was never alive to begin with. This is the position some women in Nigeria find themselves in, being married to a living, breathing husband during the day, and then having a separate marriage to a spirit spouse while asleep.

The Yoruba of West Africa are one the largest ethnic groups on the continent. Their home, Yorubaland, stretches across Togo, Benin and Nigeria. The Yoruba, like many of their neighbours, possess a complex animistic and polytheistic religion, one which shares features with the Vodun (Voodoo) tradition. Their belief in the Orisha deity pantheon, the ability for spirits to enter the world through childbirth and the importance of the ancestors has had a profound effect on global religion - in particular through the syncretism of Yoruba cosmology in the Americas leading to the development of Umbanda, Santería, Candomblé and many other belief systems. The permeability of the spirit world for the Yoruba often leads to all kinds of trouble - many spirits, demons and mischievous entities can enter the life of a person, such as an abiku child, who wishes to constantly be reborn and so dies during infancy as a human baby, only to reincarnate again and again, bringing misery to the mother.

“Abiku” and “ogbanje.” have also been linked and/or culturally explained with affliction from water spirits popularly called “Mammy Water” or “water goddess” or “Queen of the Coast” or “Eze nwanyi” (in Igbo land) or “Yemoja" or “olokun” (in Yoruba land). It is believed that these water spirits are very powerful, troublesome, unfriendly and wicked. They are said to live under streams, rivers, seas and oceans. Water spirits are further believed to appear on few occasions as handsome men but usually as beautiful ladies to the extent that beautiful ladies in real life are usually nicknamed “mammy water” to show how they resemble the female water spirits. The cultural link between “ogbanje.” and “abiku” is the belief that during transition, the water goddess who is pretty and very tempting will try to bring one away from his/her original life contract to fulfill her own. Those who get enticed by the water goddess will be under the influence of her group and herself

-Culture–bound syndromes and the neglect of cultural factors in psychopathologies among Africans (2011) OF Aina, O Morakinyo

Alongside these spirits is the universal phenomenon of witchcraft, typically performed by females amongst the Yoruba, sometimes translated as aje. Nocturnal attacks by witches can result in a form of dream-time warfare known as ogun-oru, where an individual might be tormented in the early hours of the morning by magical forces.

An interesting combination of both these aspects of Yoruba culture is the phenomenon of the ‘spirit husband’ or occasionally ‘marine husband’ (oko orun). This arises from the belief that a man and woman can be married in the spirit world, and that sometimes a man will allow the woman to enter the physical world. He will continue to visit her, to have sex with her, even to impregnate her. But he might also torment her, become jealous of her earthly husband or make her barren.

Another experience that confirms the reality and manifestation of spirit husband is the sexual encounter that transpires between it and its victim. The encounter is usually so real that the woman not only enjoys it but also experiences ejaculation. When she wakes up, she sees virginal discharge which confirms the fact that her experience is not an illusion. In consequence of the frequent sex in sleep, another manifestation is that the woman might see herself pregnant in her dream; while at the same time she begins to notice physical changes in her body anatomy which confirms the reality of her dream. Such changes include fullness of the breast, nausea and in some cases, temporary seizure of her menses, breastfeeding in dream etc… Yoruba women who have spirit husbands believe that there are certain benefits and privileges that they enjoy from spirit husbands such as lavishing them with gifts of varying kinds and magnitude. When they physically lack or are in need of anything, the spirit husband appears to them in dream with the promise to fulfil their needs

Women who have spirit husbands also claim to enjoy maximum protection from them. The spirit husbands guard them jealously and attack their perceived enemies even if it needs soliciting the supports of other members of their spiritual cult. They all rise in support of the spirit husband and in defense of their member (the woman) by attacking the adversary and causing disruptions in his or her affairs.

-The Yoruba Concept Of Spirit Husband And The Islamic Belief In Intermarriage Between Jinn and Man: A Comparative Discourse (2015) Shaykh Luqman Jimoh

The advantages of this system for some women are obvious - being happily married to a good spirit husband might prevent her from being married off to someone she doesn’t like, or she can enjoy a personal and private satisfaction that others can’t interfere with. However, many women do not want the attention of these husbands, and go to great lengths to be rid of them. A quick internet search reveals hundreds of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media pages offering relief from the oko orun. Worse still are the potential physical side effects of spirit spousal conflict, which can turn into an exhausting protracted form of nocturnal combat:

Mrs MO, a 38-year-old housewife and mother of three children, two girls and a boy, was apparently well until six months before presentation when she developed an irrational fear of having contracted a venereal disease following a generalized body rash with pruritus in her last child. She slept only very briefly at night and relatives noted that characteristically between midnight and 5 a.m., she would be awake and exhibit very strange behaviors. She would shout at top of her voice to the extent of disturbing the neighborhood. She sometimes cried like a baby and rolled on the floor, making statements of regret for her life and saying that her family was doomed to be wiped out by HIV/AIDS. She disorganized items around her home. Usually, she would not remember these actions at daybreak, and she might burst out crying when told by relatives of her strange behaviors during the night. During the day, she had occasional panic attacks with brief episodes of breathlessness and weeping. Over time, she became socially withdrawn, unable to carry out her housekeeping tasks, and was very sad most days. She had poor appetite with slight weight loss. Her husband and a pastor interpreted this behavior as evidence of being bewitched and also under the influence of a curse.

Prayer and deliverance sessions were organized to cast out the spirit of witchcraft and sever the patients’ connection to a spirit husband who might have been tormenting her with the ogun oru. However, there was no response to the spiritual treatment, hence the patient was taken to a babalawo (native healer) for further intervention for the problem. Several items were procured for deliverance activities including: pieces of white candle, a piece of red cloth, spiritual perfume, a whole coconut, and a white egg laid. She was made to rub her whole body with the raw egg, the candle and coconut in turn saying, ‘my illness should go back to my enemy, and I don’t want this sickness.’ Thereafter, she threw the piece of red cloth, the intact egg and candle into the bush (where the major trash dump of her village is located). Under cover of darkness, she broke the coconut in pieces at a T-junction of a road. Next, she was made to bathe with water fetched in a black pot from a stream, using a new sponge and soap. After this bath, she was made to break the pot into pieces and throw away the soap and sponge to be carried away by the flowing stream. Finally, she was given a native concoction to drink.

-Ogun Oru: A Traditional Explanation for Nocturnal Neuropsychiatric Disturbances among the Yoruba of Southwest Nigeria (2007) O. F. Aina & O. O. Famuyiwa

Despite Christian and Islamic inroads into Yoruban culture, belief in spirit husbands continues, and both preacher and imam struggle to cast out these devils and djinns from their faithful. Nigeria might be a relatively prosperous and modern country by African standards, but the spirit world still breaks through and torments its denizens, by both night and day.

Afro-Brazilian Demon Spouses

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One of my writing goals is to show a contemporary audience that the conceit of modern humanism or pseudo-cosmopolitanism is false. It is easy to imagine as a Westerner today that everyone around the world is basically the same, except for food and language, mostly interchangeable. I want to tear away this illusion and have people realise that pre-modern ideas of witchcraft, sorcery, magic and superstition are key features of the modern human landscape around the world. If the idea of marrying a demonic spirit in your dreams or purchasing the corpse of a young woman to wed to your dead son sounds alien and unreal, then prepare to be shocked.

Necrogamy: The Ghost Brides of China

Marriage between two or more living people is already a hellish institution to define universally, and the concept of ‘ghost marriages’ throws the whole thing into disarray. In general when we talk of a ghost marriage we mean that one or more participants to the ceremony, the spouses themselves, are deceased. This seems to come in two flavours - one purely legalistic and the other with spiritual and religious consequences. Being able to marry a dead person has many customary and lawful advantages: the legitimation of children, the preservation of inheritances within a family line or to access the social benefits of matrimony. Many western nations have allowed ghost marriages in exceptional circumstances, such as Nazi Germany during WW2. France permits dozens of ghost marriages every year, since it is permitted under Article 171 of the Civil Code. Some recent examples include the widow Magali Jaskiewicz, whose fiancé had been killed by a car two days after seeking permission to wed from the town hall, and the spouse of Xavier Jugelé - the police officer killed by a jihadi on Paris' Champs Elysees in 2017. Other notable countries and cultures which permit legalistic ghost marriages include the Nuer and Atwot Nilotic peoples of South Sudan. Here the constant feuding and raiding between pastoralists has led to a practice whereby the brother of a dead man acts as a living substitute, allowing a woman to marry the deceased. Any children are considered to be of the dead man’s lineage, and wealthy women often choose to marry a ghost groom in order to protect their wealth and hand it off to their children.

The second type of ghost marriage has much deeper implications. In both China and Japan the institution of ghost marriages resonates in the spiritual world. In China and Taiwan it is known as yinhun (阴婚) or minghun (冥婚), translating as ‘dark marriage’ (yin from the well known yin-yang) or using the term for underworld. To understand the origins we need to delve into the mists of time, reaching back to the Shang dynasty (1,600 - 1,050 BC). One of the classic features of this period was a shamanistic focus on divination and human sacrifice, many victims have been recovered from royal tombs. With the accession of the Zhou dynasties and the blossoming of Confucian, Daoist and Legalist thought, human sacrifice became to be regarded as something evil, something contrary to proper human nature. In its place came an early version of yinhun, where the deceased could be married in the spiritual realm. In the Confucian text, The Rites of Zhou, ghost marriages were prohibited, indicating that the practice was already widespread. The later Han dynasty era warlord-poet Cao Cao married his 13 year old dead son, the child prodigy Cao Chong, to a dead young woman Miss Zhen, underscoring how popular ghost marriages continued to be.

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From the years 2005 to 2011, over 3,000 people were put to death in Tanzania for the crime of witchcraft. Before that, around 50,000 to 60,000 more were killed between 1960 and 2000 for the same reas…

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I had seen some pretty tough things during my time in Africa, but for a second I felt sick. O’Reilly cleared his throat. He’d seen the expression on my face. ‘Obviously we all find this . . . distressing . . .’ he said. ‘We have next to nothing to go on, Dr Hoskins. We don’t know who the child is, or where he comes from. We’re guessing that he’s of African or Caribbean extraction. We don’t know exactly what happened to him. According to our home office pathologist, Dr Mike Heath, the cut to the neck is very precise. He thinks it was made from back to front, and that his body was drained of its blood – though you must keep that information completely confidential. We haven’t released it to the press.’

When the torso of a young African boy was fished out of the Thames in September, 2001, the UK public was already aware of the barbaric murder of another African child just a year earlier - Victoria Adjo Climbié. The mood was one of confusion and disgust. Fatal child abuse cases were depressingly common (averaging 78 a year since the 1970’s), but the added elements of witchcraft, mutilation and even ritual sacrifice placed both cases into a new category of horror. These types of crimes are now classified as CALFB - ‘Child Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief’ - a typically bland modern euphemism for often intensely gruesome acts of torturous exorcisms, beatings and deaths, where the parents of guardians of a child believe that inflicting violence will help cure them of a supernatural affliction. Despite decades of awareness and incident after incident making national headlines, UK law enforcement seem powerless to stop this steadily growing trend of immigrant related crime. Between 2000 - 2006, 38 specific witchcraft related child abuse cases had been documented, by 2018, 1950 cases were being reported per year, with the Telegraph quoting local councils saying “40 cases a week”. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. My aim here is to outline the landscape of the past 20 years, the major cases and responses, and to demonstrate how the UK has utterly failed to stamp out this particular form of crime. The inevitable conclusion is that UK law enforcement is simply incapable of policing African immigrant enclaves, especially in London, and that this is yet another imported cultural crime which will never be properly tackled.

The Murder of Victoria Climbié

Victoria’s story is set in the context of European and African immigration and welfare systems. She was born on the 2nd of November 1991 in Abobo, Ivory Coast and by all accounts was an intelligent and promising child. The villain in this story is her great-aunt, Marie-Thérèse Kouao, her father’s aunt. She was born in 1956 and had attained French citizenship, living on benefits in Paris with her sons and husband. She returned to the Ivory Coast in October 1998 for her brother’s funeral, planning on returning to France with another little girl called Anna. Her motive appears to have been to use a child in order to gain more welfare back home, but Anna or her parents had changed their mind. Kouao convinced the Climbiés to allow her to take Victoria in her place on Anna’s passport, promising her a fine French education. The parents agreed. Between November 1998 and April 1999 Victoria lived with Kouao in Paris, where the authorities had already noticed her absenteeism from school. The French benefits agency was pursuing Kouao and Victoria’s school had issued a Child at Risk Emergency Notification following obvious signs of abuse and mistreatment. Kouao then fled to the UK on her French passport, allowing her to disappear under the radar with ease. They arrived in London on April 24th, Victoria sporting a wig with a shaved head to pass as the photograph of Anna in her passport.

From this point on Victoria’s tale becomes a litany of spiralling abuse, social service incompetency and administrative farce. Kouao managed to secure housing and job, then a boyfriend, Carl Manning. Between April 1999 and February 2000 Kouao and Victoria saw dozens of housing officers, welfare and social service workers, police officers, medical practitioners and child protective services. Kouao contacted and visited Ealing social services 18 times and Victoria visited a GP and was admitted to hospital twice, both times with serious injuries stemming from physical abuse. The full horror of what Victoria endured only became apparent when she was finally rushed, unconscious, to St Mary’s hospital with hypothermia, organ failure and severe malnutrition. After her death the pathologist documented 128 separate injuries, calling it the “worst case of child abuse” she had ever seen. For the short time she had been in the UK she had been beaten, scalded with boiling water, burnt with cigarettes, starved, deprived of water and subject to astonishingly degrading and humiliating practices. Her fear of her great-aunt and her boyfriend caused her to wet the bed at night, which was punished by Victoria being made to sleep in a bin liner in the bath, her hands tied and deprived of any blankets.

Aftermath: Laming Inquiry

The details of the case were to be exposed over a long public enquiry, the most expensive in British legal history. The enquiry was damning in its verdict about institutional failure, noting 12 separate events where someone should have intervened to save her life. But the end result was poor and nothing significant happened. Following appeals, all the relevant social workers, doctors and police officers kept their jobs and right to work with children. The point made early on in the enquiry, that all the key social workers and officers were black, and made inappropriate judgement calls regarding cultural differences, was shouted down as racist. A number of recommendations led to the typical sprawling ‘blob’ approach of British governance, with a new (and largely pointless) Children Act of 2004, the creation of Local Children's Safeguarding Boards and the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England, which explicitly fights to have the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child incorporated into British law. The fact that Kouao took Victoria to see several African church pastors and informed them that she was suffering from demonic possession didn’t seem to be particularly noteworthy to the enquiry.

The Boy in the River

If Victoria’s death was an anarchic hellscape of cruelty and incompetence, then the murder of the Boy Called Adam could not be more different. On 21st Sept 2001, the torso of a young West African boy was fished out of the Thames. The initial result revealed that his arms, legs and head had been carefully and expertly removed and his blood drained from an incision in his neck. This was not the insanity of a woman beating a spirit-riddled child, this was a methodical and well-planned ritual murder. To quote from Richard Hoskins, a religious anthropologist who worked on the case:

‘I don’t believe Adam was butchered for his body parts,’ I said. ‘His genitals and internal organs were all intact. He was not killed agonizingly slowly, but quickly – at least fairly quickly – by precise cuts to the throat, his body held horizontally or upside down until it was drained of blood. And the body was dressed in orange-red shorts after death and placed in the river. For all these reasons, it is my conviction that Adam was the victim of a human sacrifice…

‘Let me go further,’ I said. ‘Given that Adam was almost certainly African, he was probably sacrificed as an offering to one of the gods or deities of West Africa. Why West Africa? In my opinion, it’s only there that sufficiently sophisticated religious and ritual systems exist that could account for the complexity of the awful ceremony to which he was subjected…

If I’m right about that, then many aspects of this disturbing crime fall into place. The colour of the shorts will prove to be important, and similarly the deposition of the body in water. Also the precise way the killing was carried out. And the timing: the fact that the body was dressed in the shorts only after death. We do not know yet why they wanted to sacrifice a child in London, but they obviously felt they needed power for something major, which as yet is unknown to us…

But identifying the particular god or goddess is no easy task – there are literally hundreds in the West African pantheon. I will be looking further at deities associated with both the colours orange and red, and with water – especially those in the Yoruba tradition and surrounding ethnic groups’

The contents of Adam’s stomach also make for grim reading. Clay pellets, full of gold and quartz, consistent with West African river deltas, plus an assortment of animal bone, charcoal and plant matter. Hoskins identified this a traditional pre-sacrifice potion, made by cooking down powerful and unusual ingredients over an open fire. The smoking gun was the presence of the calabar bean. This bean, also known as the ordeal bean, is highly poisonous. Given in small doses the practice of witchcraft accusation rested on whether the offender vomited or died. In very small amounts the toxins produce a numbing or even paralysing effect. Adam’s shorts were also a mystery. They turned out to be a specific brand sold only in Germany and Austria, suggesting perhaps that Adam had spent time in Europe before being moved to the UK. This suspicion was confirmed by several arrests and leads in the following years which placed Adam in Germany with a Yoruba cult prior to his ritual murder in London. The colour of the shorts, plus the fact he was dressed after his death and placed into water strengthened the case for a Yoruba sacrifice.

To this day the mystery of Adam’s death has not been solved and his killers remain free. What this careful, premeditated ritual killing suggests is that the UK had one or more Nigerian groups which planned for similar sacrifices, and that Adam is far from the only victim.

Blood & Sacrifice

In the wake of Victoria and Adam’s murders, the Metropolitan Police Force began surveying African communities and churches, looking for clues and evidence that might reveal the scale of the witchcraft and sacrifice problem. In 2005 a leaked internal report confirmed the worst fears - an unknown number of African children were being smuggled into the UK for the express purpose of blood harvesting and human sacrifice. Within the toxic brew of beliefs around witchcraft, including the Congolese belief in kindoki and the West African belief in ju-ju magic, a number of different issues were emerging as specific threats to children:

• Church pastors who encouraged a belief in demonic and spiritual possession which may require physical abuse and violence to be inflicted on the child in order to cure them.

• Children being sent back to different African countries for violent exorcisms.

• The production of magical and healing potions and mixtures by witchdoctors which may require the blood of particular children. These children may be kept alive for long periods to harvest their blood.

• Children being trafficked from African countries, in particular Uganda, for the purposes of blood harvesting and sacrifice.

Gallingly, some African community charities and organisations demanded a robust police response and decried the lack of action. Debbie Ariyo, the director of Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, is quoted as saying:

"The way forward is for the government to sit up and realise that something horrible is going on and do something concrete about it. We know definitely there is an increasing number of children being trafficked. Now is the right time for the government to accept there is a problem."

‘Child B’ & Project Violet

In November 2003, a group of council wardens discovered an 8 year old child shivering in the stairwell of a Hackney flat. The child, known only as ‘Child B’, turned out to be an orphan from Angola, smuggled into the UK by her aunt - who hasn’t been named - in 2002. During her time in Britain Child B was subject to vicious and brutal acts of torture from at least three adults: her aunt, Sita Kisanga and Sebastian Pinto. Child B gave harrowing testimony, describing how she was beaten with belts, cut with knives and had chili peppers rubbed into her eyes. This was only discovered in January 2004, after social services sent the girl to hospital - she had been mistakenly returned to her aunt by the authorities over Christmas. The three abusers had planned to drown the girl in a canal, zipped up in a laundry bag, but had backed out at the last moment. The police discovered that the aunt was insistent the girl was infected with kindoki, a Congolese belief in witchcraft, and that her pastor at the Church of Spiritual Warfare had identified her as a witch, an ndoki.

In the wake of Victoria Climbie’s murder, the Victoria Climbie Foundation (VCF) had been established by her parents to act as a grassroots charity, campaigning to ensure such deaths never happened again. The London Safeguarding Children Board, itself set up on the recommendation of the Laming Report, worked with the VCF and the Met Police to pioneer community projects aimed at understanding child abuse amongst African and South Asian communities. This led to the creation of Project Violet, a police initiative to gather intelligence, evidence and train officials on spotting signs of religious or ritual abuse. The Met Police also created the Community Partnership Pilot Project. This consulted African and Asian communities in two parts of London, discussing ‘possession in children’ - it was clear that the belief that children can be possessed was widespread and could certainly lead to abuse.

In 2006 the Child Abuse Linked To Accusations of Possession and Witchcraft report was published by Eleanor Stobart. This aimed to collate all known cases of witchcraft related child abuse in the UK and revealed at least 38 confirmed cases involving 47 children. As expected, all but one case involved children of African immigrants, in particular from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In many instances the children were living with step-parents or other relatives and many showed signs of learning difficulties, epilepsy, autism or other disabilities.

The Murder of Kristy Bamu

The murder of 15 year old Kristy Bamu on Christmas Day 2010 was the next serious high profile case of witchcraft related deaths in Britain. Kristy Bamu was one of five children, his oldest sister Magalie Bamu lived in London with her boyfriend Eric Bikubi. Both Bikubi and the Bamus originally came from the DRC and Bikubi had been reared by his father with a profound terror of kindoki, bordering on the schizophrenic. Similar to the case of Victoria Climbie, the Bamus seem to have either French citizenship or immigration rights in France, allowing them to move freely to Britain. Magalie had invited her siblings to visit her and Bikubi over Christmas and they travelled from Paris, excited to spend the holiday with her.

Almost immediately upon arrival Bikubi locked them in their flat and accused all the children of bringing evil spirits into his house. They were denied food and water, beaten and made to stay awake for days, praying all night. Several of the youngest children confessed to being ndoki, to make the tortures stop, but Kristy refused. The children begged their elder sister to protect them, but she refused. Kristy wet the bed, after which Bikubi decided that he was the source of the problem. Turning on him he encouraged the youngsters to join in a frenzy of violence against the teenager - smashing ceramic tiles across his head and back, beating him with a metal bar which was forced into his mouth and down his throat, breaking his teeth and hands with a hammer, mutilating his ears with a pair of pliers and more. On Christmas Eve Bikubi phoned the Bamu’s parents and informed them he was going to kill Kristy. Pierre and Jacqueline Bamu began racing from Paris to save their son, but it was too late. On Christmas Day Bikubi forced all the children into the bathtub and hosed them down with icy water. Kristy pleaded with his tormentors to “let him die”, he got his wish. After nearly four days with no sleep and over 130 injuries to his body, Kristy was exhausted and broken. He slipped under the water and drowned. The paramedics arrived to a chamber of horrors - the prosecutor described broken tiles and blood everywhere, naked hysterical children screaming in French and the ghastly disfigured body of Kristy Bamu, every limb broken and bloody.

Where Are We Now?

12 years on from Kristy Bamu’s death and 22 years after Victoria Climbie’s, it seems as though little has changed. The cases continue to pile up and the transnational networks of child trafficking have only grown. Almost every few years another headline declares “officers to be given specialist training in detecting witchcraft child abuse”, to little avail. The most recent initiative, Project Amber, has plunged headlong into the standard progressive response to immigrant related crime - ensuring we don’t stigmatise and reinforce harmful tropes. As the project founder, Trinity Junior Research Fellow Dr Naomi Richman says:

Witchcraft beliefs and spirit possession practices are common in so many societies around the world and are not in themselves at all harmful. They can simply be ways of explaining misfortune or resolving interpersonal disputes. In the UK, we have sadly witnessed an increase in children being accused of witchcraft, or of being possessed, which is then used to sanction child abuse. . . We are seeking to develop understanding of this complicated and sensitive area, and so the goal of the Amber Project is to equip audiences with the tools to recognise this type of harm whilst correcting the numerous misperceptions surrounding it, including ideas around witchcraft and possession only belonging to some groups.

The message is clear - there is nothing inherent to the African immigrant community worth investigating, witchcraft beliefs are benign and ordinary, we must correct misperceptions and taboos… After reading report after report from the last two decades the language has become more diffuse and bureaucratic, a shift from direct speech to “equipping audiences with tools”, “improving trust and confidence within the communities which we serve through effective safeguarding”, “harm reduction through stakeholder engagement” and so on.

What seems to be obvious as an outsider looking in, is that each high profile crime prompts a new expansion in semi-official, community based charity and advocacy groups, rather than a focus on policing methods and approaches. We now have the Victoria Climbie Foundation, The Churches’ Child Protection Advisory Service, Children and Families Across Borders, Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, the Centre for Social Work Research and the Congolese Family Centre amongst others. This sprawling web of unaccountable organisations has formed a blob-like mesh which constantly redefines and redirects the aims of policing towards other goals. The job of the police is to detect and prevent crime by enforcing the law, but reading through the literature on faith based child abuse, one would be forgiven for thinking their job was to solve poverty, enforce UN declarations across Africa and act as a strange mediating referee amongst African communities in the UK. What many of these cases have in common is: the ability for African immigrants to leave and enter the UK undetected; the ability for people to hide and move around big cities like London without suspicion; the proliferation of African churches and witchdoctor services with little to no oversight and the total cultural, linguistic and religious divide between new immigrant communities and the host nation. Personally I see no way for the police to do their job in this environment, assuming they wanted to. We will never know how many children have been brought into the country to be bled for potions, sacrificed to a deity, used as a slave or violently killed for being a witch. We are blind as to the extent of connections between the DRC, Uganda, Nigeria and the UK. We get glimpses of children being sent back for genital mutilation, exorcism or breast ironing, we get hints that children disappear to order and reappear in London, but we don’t have the means to prevent it from happening. It’s only a matter of time before the next Victoria, Adam, Child B or Kristy appears on the news.

Human sacrifice, the intentional killing of a person as part of a religious ritual, is usually explored in the past tense. The infamous civilisations of Central America, of Carthage, of the Celts, ca…

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