Why Is Papua New Guinea Still Hunting Witches?

Editor’s note: the following story contains images and content that may be disturbing to some readers.

In most parts of the world, stories about witch-hunts are confined to documentaries and mini-series. But in the Southeast Asian nation of Papua New Guinea, real-life witch-hunts that end in torture or murder are so commonplace they rarely make the evening news. Most also go uninvestigated by police. This comes despite the introduction of the death penalty for witch-hunting in 2013, after Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old woman accused of using witchcraft to kill a neighbor’s boy, was burnt alive on a busy street corner as hundreds of people looked on.

But late last year, when news broke that a six-year-old girl accused of sorcery had been tortured by a group of men and only narrowly escaped with her life following a daring rescue mission by lay-missionary Anton Lutz from Iowa, the story made headlines not only in PNG but across the world.

The drama began when a man fell ill at a remote village in Enga Province in the highlands of PNG. It could have been HIV/AIDS or just an upset stomach. But his sickness was diagnosed as kaikai lewa (to eat the heart), where a witch uses black magic to secretly remove and eat the victim’s heart to gain their virility. As the daughter of a woman who’d been accused of the same crime, the six-year-old girl was fingered as the prime suspect. So a group of villagers took her, stripped her naked, and tortured her for days, using hot knives to remove the skin from her back and buttocks.

By the time Lutz arrived at the village, the man whose illness had sparked the witch-hunt had staged a miraculous recovery. The perpetrators read this to mean their gruesome work had worked and incentivized the little witch to return his heart. There was no need to torture her any further – now. “After a couple of hours talking to the community, I was able to get her released into my care and took her to a hospital,” Lutz told me when I visited PNG in December.