Witch-Hunts

Witch-hunts are organized searches for people accused of practicing witchcraft, historically pursued through formal accusation, interrogation, torture and execution, and in the present day through informal community violence and displacement. The best documented wave took place in early modern Europe and colonial America between roughly 1450 and 1750, when tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, were tried and executed as witches amid the religious upheavals of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years' War. Formal European witch trials ended by the eighteenth century as legal and religious authorities abandoned witchcraft prosecutions, but the underlying practice of accusing individuals of witchcraft did not disappear. Contemporary witch-hunts continue in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea and South Asia, where accused individuals, again disproportionately women, older people and children, face mob violence, banishment or killing, and where several countries still maintain legislation against witchcraft. Historians treat the historical and contemporary phenomena as a single continuous pattern of persecution.