Witchcraft, and accusations of witchcraft, are returning to Britain. We might think of witchcraft as a thing of the past; sadly, this isn’t the case. In multicultural Britain, folk practices like witchcraft and sorcery are more common than you might expect. Alongside the practice of witchcraft, there is also its opposite: accusations that others, particularly children, are witches, or demons, or possessed by spirits.
In the last decade in Britain, 14,000 social work assessments flagged possible abuse linked to faith or belief, which includes witchcraft, and also things like spirit possession, and claims about the presence of demons or the devil. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments, according to official statistics. In London, the Metropolitan Police recorded 569 witchcraft accusations or cases of ritual abuse between 2021 and 2024.
An accusation of witchcraft does not just mean a false and malicious claim against a vulnerable person. It means what the jargon calls ‘faith-based abuse’.
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