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England: Josie Appleton has written an interesting article about the reaction to the conviction of three people for abusing a child they believed to be witch. In particular she questions the racist assumptions made by the media, social services and the police about the case. It quickly begins to sound as if something very familar indeed is going on.
The case quickly became a careering bandwagon, on to which police, social services and the media leapt. This was understood not as the criminal actions of one woman, but as a sign of the barbarity of Africans in general. Articles speculated about the dozens, even hundreds, of African children being subjected to mystical abuse behind the closed doors of north-east London. The Metropolitan Police has set up a special six-person team, 'Project Violet', to tackle ritualised child abuse in London's African communities.
MP Diane Abbott quickly established a claim to take over the ecological niche left by the late Geoffrey Dickens:
Because the defendants attended an evangelical church in Hackney, their crime apparently implicated the whole African spiritual infrastructure. 'Ban these witchcraft churches', called Diane Abbott in the London Evening Standard on 7 June. According to the Abbott, MP for Hackney North, churches should be registered, opened up for monitoring, and shut down 'the minute any child connected to their congregation is abused'.
Yet there is little hard evidence to justify these wild claims. It seems to be the accusers who are possessed with ideas of mass, ritualised child abuse—not London's immigrant communities.
Appleton then reports on some more familiar-sounding hyperbole:
According to an article in the Sunday Telegraph on 5 June, a Met intelligence report identified 31 similar cases over the past five years in London, five of which led to charges - and called for 'ritualised abuse' to be made a new category of crime with stiff penalties. But if that's the case, few others in the Met seem to know about it. 'I need to find out where they [the Sunday Telegraph] got their information', the press officer in charge of Project Violet told me.
Exorcism isn't limited to African churches - it is practised rather widely, and by perfectly respectable churches:
Dr Robert Beckford, lecturer in African Diasporan Religions and Cultures at Birmingham University, notes that 'all the Abrahamic faiths and African religions believe in evil and exorcism, including the Archbishop of Canterbury'. Dr Beckford argues that recent reports exhibit a 'demonisation' of African communities on a par with 'nineteenth-century images of West Africa. The idea seems to be that these are illiterate people from West Africa, so they've got to be crazy'...
...Of course, belief in exorcism is mystical and backward, and that applies as much to the Archbishop of Canterbury as to Hackney evangelicals. Over the past five to 10 years, Joel Edwards tells me, there has been an increase in 'highly spiritual' African churches, often organised in people's front rooms or derelict buildings. The practice of exorcism expresses the fact that people feel themselves to be in the grip of malevolent forces - it's a way of trying to fight back, and establish some control over their lives. It's no surprise, then, that these ceremonies become more intense in more uprooted and marginalised communities. But these beliefs persist because of continuing social marginalisation. There's not a jot that Met re-education programmes can do about them.
And then, right at the very end, she realises that we've seen this sort of thing before:
Given this fragile context, Project Violet could be walking into a minefield. There is also the fact of denominational rivalry, which no doubt fuels some of the circling accusations. There are precedents for this. Accusations of Satanic child abuse between 1988 and 1991 led to children being removed from their homes in Rochdale and Orkney. Yet it turned out it was Evangelical Christians, resentful of new religious movements, who had sparked the rumours. (The resonance of this issue is indicated by the fact that, over 10 years after this case was dead and buried by a government report, investigations have again been opened up.)
I strongly recommend reading the entire article.
Preying on minority communities - Spiked, 10th June 2005.
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Church and State
and Conspiracies: Satanic Abuse Myth
at 12:53. Last modified on September 28 2006 at 23:43.
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