The troubling truth about ‘witchcraft’ in modern Britain

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 have been linked to false accusations of witchcraft. Between March 2023 and 2024 alone, there were 2,180 such assessments connected to witchcraft, according to research carried out by the National FGM Centre.

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’. That could be as mild – as if anything like that is harmless to a child – as being accused of something that’s not true: harbouring devils, for instance, or being possessed by an evil force.