A SUN investigation has found vile “witchcraft” abuse of children is on the
rise in Britain – and it is not just restricted to those from African
backgrounds.

A criminologist and expert in African religion, who also acts as a
consultant on murder cases, believes church cults are freely promoting
brutal exorcisms of “possessed” children because officials fear offending
cultural beliefs.

Here, he insists authorities must not allow violence to be masked as
multiculturalism.

CARYS should be like any other teenage girl – bubbly, confident and finding
her feet in the world.

Instead she is bruised and battered, her hair matted from drying blood.

Her eyes are fire-red and swollen from the rub of chilli peppers.

She shows me the scar marks on her arms where she has been cut with a knife.
Other instruments have been used in the torture — sticks, hot spoons, an
iron rod.

There are lacerations to her face, back, stomach and hands.

She has even had chilli peppers rubbed into her private parts.

After Carys was taken to hospital two days ago, she arrived at school with a
fresh wound to her head.

A teacher spotted the blood running down the side of her face and called
social services.

A doctor examined her and found more than 25 separate wounds to the body on
first inspection.

Why has she suffered like this? Because she’s a witch. Or at least, so her
mother thinks.

She attends a new revivalist church in north London, where messages of
possession by witchcraft and the need for deliverance are regularly
proclaimed.

Carys is not alone. I have a dozen investigations on my desk from police and
social services.

Not all of them are African children. There are scene-of-crime photos from
ritual murders involving white British where I’ve helped decode dark symbols
in the name of extremist religious beliefs.

The new cases are drawn from around Britain — interview notes, photographs,
 more body maps spanning from London to Birmingham, Peterborough to Glasgow.

A significant proportion involve children being accused of witchcraft. The
“carers” of these children — whether parents, aunts or uncles — are involved
in abusing them in the name of extremist religious beliefs.

I first came across kindoki, the Lingala word for “witchcraft”, when I went to
Africa as a young man in the 1980s. I learned about kindoki first-hand from
the witchdoctors, traditional healers there.

For hundreds, probably thousands, of years it was the catch-all for evil —
something which troubled you from outside. It was usually quickly dealt with
by the witchdoctor, who would offer a sympathetic ear then prescribe herbal
medicines.

Then it all changed.

Fundamentalist Christian cults mixed with this ancient belief to create a
deadly new cocktail.

Their pastors started preaching about children being possessed by kindoki. The
children were witches.

And their only hope, if they weren’t to find themselves literally cast out on
 to the streets, would be deliverance or exorcism.

These deliverances are often very violent. They include fasting children from
all food and water for days.

Last year I met a girl at death’s door because the pastor had not let her
drink for days despite the tropical heat.

Children are often shaken and beaten. They are sometimes even cut with razor
blades. I met children sent back to Africa from Britain to undergo these
exorcisms. In another case, Islington Council incredibly even sought my
advice on whether a child in their care should be sent back to Kinshasa in
Congo for deliverance — at the taxpayers’ expense.

I have a current case where those responsible are asking for the same thing —
to send the British child to Africa for deliverance.

All for a fee into the pastors’ pockets, naturally. As one village elder told
me in the Congo: “It is a scandal — children are being abused so that these
pastors can get rich.”

But this isn’t just some African problem. It’s here. Now. In the UK. And the
situation is getting worse. These cults are spreading their evil message. I
gave evidence this year in the murder trial of 15-year-old Kristy Bamu at
the Old Bailey. For many of us it was the worst case we had ever
encountered. I saw hardened police officers reduced to tears.

In December 2010, Kristy was savagely tortured by his sister Magalie Bamu and
her boyfriend Eric Bikubi.

He had 131 separate injuries. They used a knife, pliers, a table leg and
ceramic floor tiles, which were smashed over his head.

They rammed a metal dumbbell down his throat so that his teeth were broken.
Eventually Kristy was dragged to the bathroom and drowned. Magalie Bamu and
Eric Bikubi were found guilty and sentenced to life, with minimum terms of
25 and 30 years respectively.

And it was all because they thought he was a witch. Kristy wasn’t the first
child we know about to suffer for this here in Britain.

Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old from the Ivory Coast, died in London in
February 2000 after a horrendous period of sustained torture.

She had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and forced to sleep in a bin liner
in an empty bath.

When she was finally taken to hospital it was too late to save her life — 128
separate scars were found on her body.

In 2001 her great-aunt Marie Therese Kouao, and Marie’s boyfriend Carl
Manning, were convicted of murder and sentenced to life. They believed
Victoria was a witch.

The Laming report after Victoria’s death pointed the finger at gross failure
of public agencies.

There was a lack of joined-up thinking and work between agencies such as
police, social services, medics and schools. The catalogue of errors
indicated systemic failures that had to be eradicated. For a while we all
hoped they had.

The Every Child Matters agenda, which forced multi-agency joined-up thinking,
was meant to prevent anything like Victoria Climbié happening again in this
country.

However, a decade later, there are grave causes for concern.

When Carys’s mother was arrested for abuse in the name of witchcraft, some of
those responsible decided that the best person to place Carys with that
night was… the pastor.

He arranged for all the extended family to come and put pressure on Carys to
withdraw all evidence. Had she not been so strong, this case would have
fallen by the wayside.

This problem is not just about multi-agency co-operation, however. It’s about
the underlying failure to tackle abuse when it is masked behind
multiculturalism. Some women and children from diverse cultural backgrounds
are suffering abuse, even death, because authorities are too afraid to
intervene.

This week I received an email from a British woman with an African-Caribbean
background.

After reading my new book, she felt compelled to write.

Her words are ringing in my ears: “Evil must never be rationalised away as a
‘cultural norm’ in the pursuit of political correctness.”

We celebrate diverse beliefs in this country. Yet there is growing evidence
that all manner of evils are being committed in the name of cultural beliefs
and practices that, quite simply, should play no part in contemporary
Britain.

The Boy In The River, by Richard Hoskins, is published by Pan,
paperback, £7.99.

£4,000 visit ‘outrageous’

DESPITE the seriousness of British witchcraft abuse, Dr Hoskins says a £4,000
taxpayer-funded research trip he took to the Congo was an “outrageous” waste
of public cash.

The trip was arranged by Islington Council social services after a mother
claimed her 14-year-old son needed to be sent home because he was possessed.
Dr Hoskins, a research fellow in criminology at Roehampton University, said:
“If I didn’t come back with an assessment, he would have been sent out
anyway. It’s outrageous. As a taxpayer justifying that, it’s not right.”

Islington Council said the trip was on the instructions of a judge.