Children in Africa - this time, Angola to be specific - continue to suffer unimaginably because they are easy marks for witchcraft accusations. Their own families will beat them, torture them, and toss them out into the streets. This is a very real and very terrible example of how religious superstition can do a lot of damage to the innocent and defenseless.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Last month [13-year-old] Helena was accused by her parents of sickening two of her nieces with evil spells. In retaliation, the bewildered girl says, one of her small hands was burned on a red-hot stove. Her meager possessions, including her clothes, were torched. She was choked. And finally, to destroy her reputation in the community, she was beaten in front of a large crowd. Her mother and elder sisters administered these punishments. "They tell me that if I try to come home they will kill me," sobbed Helena her tears spattering the floor of the church shelter where she has run for safety. "They say I'm cursed." ... According to rights advocates in town, children as young as 5 have been hanged, stoned to death, raped, burned and drowned in rivers after being accused of sorcery.

Why Angolans are turning with such horrific ferocity against their young, especially at this relatively benign point in their wounded history, is a question few experts can answer with certainty. Some blamed the recent proliferation of fire-and-brimstone evangelical churches in Angola, whose apocalyptic vision of the universe--and profit from exorcisms--meshes nicely with an epidemic of witchcraft. Others cited the spread of particularly noxious beliefs in magic from neighboring Congo, where the phenomenon of child sorcerers also is taking root in an atmosphere of economic and political lawlessness.

Witchcraft is also apparently profitable - one of the few profitable ventures in Angola. People offer to "cure" afflicted children and although they don't charge the families, they do utilize the children as slave laborers in order to compensate for the very rough "treatments." The only people who don't appear to believe that the children are witches are the children themselves, but no one listens to them - they are, if lucky, simply shunned. And thus does a society consume its own children and its own future.

Read More:

• Witches and Witchcraft: Chronology