Thursday, April 06, 2006

BBC NEWS | Africa | Congo child sorcery abuse on rise

Something that makes me constantly lose it when I talk about it, so I let the BBC do the work, to preserve my sanity.
BBC NEWS | Africa | Congo child sorcery abuse on rise

"A report has highlighted what it calls an alarming rise in the abuse of boys and girls accused of sorcery in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Such children are physically abused and end up on the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, Human Rights Watch says.

The organisation has been examining the plight of children in the country."
Desperation, nepotism, lack of viable leadership, and poverty, have a tendency to lead to fanaticism, lunacy and inquisition... in Congo it's proven again, like in nth century Spain, and 21st century Middle East before. Do humans ever learn?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is so sad.
I heard that these children end up sleeping in cemeteries and "survive" through prostitution.
How can this happen ?

Anonymous said...

I just returned from a research trip to the southern part of Katanga Province in the DRC and was shocked at what I discovered there about "sorcery children." The city of Lubumbashi alone has an estimated 30,000 street children and the majority are accused of "sorcery," usually because a family member has been stricken with AIDS or some other disease. Children are often sleeping at the train station, at the marketplace or in alleys and are being further victimized by sex predators and thousands of truck drivers in the area, who bring AIDS and other problems with them from elsewhere in Africa.

For more information on my trip please see World Vision's blog at http://blog.worldvision.org/ and search on "sorcery".

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