
The Devil’s Scapegoats: An Anatomy of the Child Witchcraft Moral Panic in Southern Nigeria
Executive Summary This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the moral panic surrounding child witchcraft accusations in the southern Nigerian states of Akwa Ibom and Cross River, a human rights crisis that erupted in the 1990s and peaked in the 2000s. An estimated 15,000 children in these two states were branded as witches, leading to a campaign of horrific abuse, torture, abandonment, and murder. This phenomenon was not the resurgence of an ancient tradition but a distinctly modern crisis, born from a confluence of severe socio-economic distress and the rise of a new, commercialized Pentecostal theology that provided a supernatural