From The Metro:
Children in Britain are increasingly at risk of being branded as witches and tortured, police are claiming, following the high-profile case of Kristy Bamu - tortured and murdered by his brother for being a kindoki witch.
The threat comes from the rise of the West African belief, which states children can be possessed by evil spirits, according to a specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft. It is thought to be widespread among some immigrant communities, fuelled by a growing number of small fundamentalist Christian churches.
The belief is not confined to the poor or ill-educated and many cases of children being abused may never be uncovered, the officers fear...
Hang about here, can you see all the buzzwords they use to cloud the issue: "Children in Britain", "at risk", "the threat", "belief", "immigrant communities" etc? Wouldn't it it be more accurate to say something like this:
"Immigrants from central and west Africa, who are followers/members of certain religious sects which are widespread in those countries, have a tendency to torture and murder children in their care"?
Having done their profiling (call it 'racial profiling' if you will), the police can now get on with the job of tracking down the culprits. See also: female genital mutilation; murdering young women (and possibly some young men?) who refuse to enter into forced marriages; gender-related abortions; Roman Catholic priests; etc.
Finally: WTF is a "specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft"?? There's no such thing as witchcraft, and even if there is, it is not illegal as far as I am aware. It's torturing and murdering people (for whatever reason) which is illegal and needs to be investigated.
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10 comments:
"according to a specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft."
Call out the Witchfinder General! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witchfinder_General) When you have a "specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft", they will find witches, or witchcraft, never fear; their jobs depend on it.
There's a unit to investigate witchcraft? What do they do throw suspects in the lake to see if they sink or not?
The police do love their specialist task forces and teams, don't they?
It's almost as if it's just a job-creation scheme or something...
There's another aspect they leave out.
Many people in Africa are Animists or other traditional African religion, which is often syncretized with Islam or Christianity.
Since the transmission of Christianity to African postdates the end of Western fear of witches it seems much more likely that this owes more to traditional belief rather than the alleged evangelical Christian.
Sorry that should end "fundamentalist Christianity"
B, true.
R, no doubt J K Rowling will be first in line.
JuliaM, indeed. They ought to set up a task force to look into these job creation schemes.
JohnM, that's what you might think, I refer you to my subsequent post.
MarkW
As a white anglo-saxon male I have to acknowledge my wrongheadedness.
Still, better the Guardian presenting a self evidently ludicrous argument in favour of "the racism of low expectations" than the Metro which takes it for granted.
Almost up there with this
JohnM, yes, I was very much reminded of "Violent Jamaican homophopbia: legacy of slavery to blame", that's probably the all-time classic of the genre.
@ comment deleted, yes, that was exactly the link you posted. I was agreeing with you :-)
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