As a freshman in college, I attended a talk being given by radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. I didn’t know much about Dworkin until this speech and I was blown away by both her passion and acuity. I realized in listening to her that my own teenaged feminism was shoddy and minimal and lacking in depth. This was the real thing. This was revolutionary.

Thirty-five years later many view Dworkin, who died suddenly and prematurely four years ago, as a fanatic whose obsessional feminism was outmoded in an allegedly post-feminist era. But in writing about Dworkin at the time of her death, I could not forget that passionate belief she devoted her life to: that patriarchy could be quelled and that equality could rise in its stead.  She hoped she would be remembered as an artifact–someone who was the last remaining evidentiary specimen of the need to fight the now-dead patriarchy.

Part of that talk of Dworkin’s I heard in the mid-1970s was devoted to witches and how they had epitomized the independent woman in a patriarchal society where female independence was anathema. In both Woman  Hating and Our Blood Dworkin had evaluated and enumerated the torture and killing of women/girls as witches throughout the ages, but most notably as done by the Church during the Inquisition. Dworkin invoked the Malleus Maleficarum also known as the Hammer of Witches and how it was used against women to explain that women were making men’s penises disappear, causing cows to dry up and other horrors.

Dworkin likened the torture and killing of women “witches” with the Holocaust and estimated that millions of women were murdered throughout Europe (and even in the U.S. in Salem) for being witches. Their crimes, inevitably, were those of independence and lack of male companionship.

Of course 35 years ago Dworkin’s radical feminism resonated deeply with a budding feminist like myself and so many others. We were so hungry for information about ourselves–information long buried by male historians–that any tidbit was eaten up with the alacrity of the starved. Feminists in the 1970s were busy doing what feminist theologian and historian Mary Daly exhorted us to do: dis-cover our collective feminine past.

In today’s post-feminist era, this is all viewed as quaint and beside the point. Our issues are so different now. At least in the West. Yet women and girls are still being tortured and killed as witches in developing countries, including democracies like India.

According to a Reuters report in September 2009  murder and persecution of women and children accused of being witches is spreading. In addition to the actual deaths, the destruction of families and the lives of millions is reaching, according to the U.N., cataclysmic proportions. “Witches” are not solo creatures–they have families and communities, all of whom are affected by the accusations of witchcraft.  

U. N. officials, civil society representatives from affected countries and non-governmental organization (NGO) specialists working on the issue urged governments to acknowledge the extent of the persecution. 

 ”This is becoming an international problem — it is a form of persecution and violence that is spreading around the globe.”

Aides to U.N. special investigators on women’s rights and on summary executions said killings and violence against alleged witches who are, just as Dworkin noted in her work, mostly older women,  have become commonplace. The killings and bizarre massive ”trials” are happening nearly everywhere, including some closed immigrant and religious communities in the U.S. But these actions are most prevalent throughout Africa, Mexico and India.

The U.N. report went on to explain that community workers from Nepal and Papua New Guinea have also found ”witch-hunting”  to be common. And lest anyone think this is just happening in rural outposts, it is not. These aid workers discovered witch purgings in rural areas but also in major cities and towns.

In September, ABC’s Nightline reported on cases of children suspected of being witches. These children are being forced out of their homes as young as five for being spawn of Satan. Many end up dead from starvation as people are afraid that feeding these little girls will associate them with witchcraft. This is happening throughout Africa, South America and India.  Increasingly, however, these children are being killed outright–often by their own families–to prove that the families are not involved in the satanic behavior of their children. Nightline filmed the exorcisms of several children, which including them having hot wax poured on them and their ski cut with knives. It was harrowing. One little girl screamed hideously during this “exorcism.”

Neither the U.N. nor other NGOs have statistics on how many women and child “witches” are killed annually. But the U.N. and CARE International  estimate tens of thousands have been murdered and hundreds of thousands have incurred  beatings, torture, banishment and isolation from their communities.

 The victims of  this most recent “witch frenzy” runs, these agencies suggest,  into the millions.

For women throughout the world, superstition combines with patriarchal hatred and oppression of women to perpetuate this “witch frenzy” that most of us thought was over centuries ago. But since women are still regularly stoned to death, burned to death, victims of “honor killings” and other monstrous acts of patriarchal “ownership” of women, the idea that women and girls as well as boys considered to be under the control of aging female witches are all being tortured and killed is not really surprising. In a world where the burkha, chador and hijab are only the most obvious representations of how separate women remain in most societies, purging communities of women who are not connected to men is older than the celebration of Hallowe’en itself. But far, far more scary. —VAB