How economic prosperity spared witches

Witch hunts are not a thing of the past. Poverty and violence often go hand in hand.

You might see a fair number of witches out and about this Halloween; they're a staple of the season. But odds are low that you’ll see any of them burned at the stake or hanged.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently  who claims she cast a magic spell on the president, “Is this legal? ... Is there any kind of federal regulation on this?”

In the United States, it is indeed permissible to wear black and try to cast spells to your heart’s content.

That’s not the case in some several parts of the world: 

• In August, an alleged witch in one of the poorest parts of India.
• Earlier this year, Tanzanian widow Ruth Zacaria fell victim to a witch hunt. Her attackers alleged that she prevented their family from being able to afford a particular property by using witchcraft to kill their father, bringing them to financial ruin.
• One witness to a witch hunt in Tanzania in 2015 described the situation in harrowing detail: "They broke into the house and hacked my wife with machetes and knives. They burned the body of my wife and later set fire on my house.”

Beliefs undoubtedly play a role in motivating these killings, and some people imagine that witch hunts result solely from cultural, not economic, factors. But as University of California-Berkeley’s Edward Miguel noted in his a study on witch killing, “Poverty and violence often go hand in hand,” and economic desperation frequently leads to scapegoating and slaughter.

Village mobs and individual families strangle, burn alive, knife or beat to death thousands of alleged witches each year, mainly in impoverished parts of the world. The Thomson Reuters Foundation estimates that in 2017, the deaths at the hands of vigilantes have numbered about 80 a month in Tanzania. Most victims are women. And an Indian law firm says it is “only the most gruesome cases that are reported — most cases of witch hunting go unreported and unrecorded.”

Miguel’s study found that in the extreme poverty of rural Tanzania, after a poor harvest, women are frequently blamed and murdered for witchcraft. In years where unusual rainfall ruins crops and creates near-famine conditions, there are about twice as many witch killings as in other years. Poor families are the most likely to murder alleged witches.

During the early 17th century, when witch killings were common across Western Europe, Germany’s average income was nearly identical to Tanzania’s in 2010: just over $800 in 1990 international dollars per person.