With Humanitarian News and Travel Stories, I hope to go beyond the news, to offer cultural insights and if possible, contact information for humanitarian groups working to right the wrongs of highlighted human rights abuses. For example, the following article from BBC News, 'Nigeria 'baby farm' girls rescued by Abia state,' is another example of the downside of patriarchy, when social norms, tradition, politics and economics are controlled by men. Here, pregnant young girls are allegedly being used as 'baby machines' and their offspring sold for adoption or for purposes of witchcraft.
Why Witchcraft?
The young girls in the article were supposedly paid the equivalent of USD $170 for their newborns, a huge sum for a desperate, poor, socially ostracized unwed mother. Greedy people in less developed countries selling infants for illegal adoptions is not a new story. On the other hand, selling newborns for witchcraft rituals is less common and far more difficult to comprehend, particularly in the West.
Stepping Stones Nigeria has produced an informative overview of witchcraft in Nigeria entitled, "Witchcraft Accusations: A Protection Concern for UNHCR and the Wider Humanitarian Community?" This paper was presented by Gary Foxcroft, Programme Director of Stepping Stones Nigeria to the UNHCR on April 6, 2009, and can be found in its' entirety on their website. Briefly, the document explains how a belief in witchcraft is part of peoples' mentality - it is real. However, there are certain conditions under which a belief in the power of witches to cause harm accelerates and leads to the torture and even death of the most vulnerable members of a community - children, women and the elderly. According to the report:
Belief in witchcraft can be conceptualized as an attempt by people to rationalize the misfortunes occurring in their life; it shapes perceptions and provides an answer to ‘why me?’ when disaster strikes. Put simply it provides an explanation for what would be otherwise unexplainable. Witchcraft accusations can therefore be seen to follow the patterns of tension and conflict in societies. Indeed the UK Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Andy Sparks, when speaking about the child witch crisis in DRC purported that:
“Accusations of sorcery are a convenient excuse for a particularly cruel way of dealing with poverty, and religion is used as its pretext. Cruelty like this should be punished, regardless of whether it is executed in the name of religion or not. It is not natural for Congolese to behave in this way. It is a recent phenomenon. The consequences of war and the subsequent massive aggravation of poverty are being exploited by a small number of pastors from private, revivalist churches who use vulnerable children as a platform upon which to exploit families that are struggling to feed themselves”.
In short, as social unrest, conflict and economic stress increase, people need a scapegoat and it is the poor and least powerful who bear the awful brunt of other peoples misfortune. Moreover, in Nigeria, accused child witches suffer severe violence at the hands of those who should be concerned for their social and spiritual welfare, evangelical pastors.
For more information on this and other issues of children and human rights visit the Child Rights Information Network.
1 June 2011 Last updated at 14:58 ET
Nigerian police have raided a hospital in the south-eastern city of Aba, rescuing 32 pregnant girls allegedly held by a human-trafficking ring. Aged between 15 and 17 years, the girls were locked up and used to produce babies, said Abia state's police chief. These were then allegedly sold for ritual witchcraft purposes or adoption. But the hospital's owner denied running a "baby farm", saying it was a foundation to help teenagers with unwanted pregnancies.
