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The Crucible And Dispatches: Return To Africa's Witch Children

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In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller and the documentary “Dispatches: Return to Africa’s Witch Children” are both connected through the lessons and messages portrayed throughout. Both works are based on witchcraft and focus on real life accusations that have occurred throughout history. In each of the works the lesson of not making accusations without any solid evidence is present. The Crucible is a play set in Salem during Puritan times, and is based on actual witch trials that occurred in Salem Massachusetts from 1692-1693. The play starts out with Betty Pariss, a young girl and daughter of the town Reverend, falling unconscious with no known cause. The town is sent into a frenzy when rumor starts that she has been affected by witchcraft. …show more content…

The documentary reveals the horrific Witch Trials that occurred in Nigeria in the early 2000’s and on. Parents of children as young as two were abusing and abandoning their kids because they believed they were witches, and needed someone to pin their struggles on. For example, “Charity is just one of the many children now living on the streets after being accused of witchcraft. For the past two years, the 13-year-old has been living in a makeshift hut in the middle of a dump site on the outskirts of Calabar'' (pulitzercenter.org). Charity is just one of the many children cast out of her home due to false accusations. This violence began because of the religion in the villages allowing people to blame any negative event or problem on witchcraft, and children were the easiest to accuse. The defenseless children could not fight back or stop the abuse that happened to them. Fake pastors would profit from this torture by offering illegitimate services such as exorcisms to dispel the Devil from children. Parent’s would also use witchcraft as an excuse to stop caring for their children if they were struggling financially. No real proof was ever given for these accusations, if something bad happened it could easily be pinned on a child. Innocent children would be outcast from their homes and villages due to false claims and unnecessary anger toward them. Had these accusations not been made, considering how unjust they were, hundreds of children would have been spared the abuse, torture, lifelong trauma, and in some cases death they were met

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They even began to take the “afflicted” girls to other towns to look for witches. Most of the people who were accused were visited by the sane people in town in hopes to bring them some warmth to this jail chamber that was covered in hair and bugs so they wouldn’t feel as bad as they did. There had bed twenty people killed for witchcraft. Fourteen of them were women, and there were two infant children and five other accused souls had died in prison. These trials were of mass hysteria caused by political drama in the church.

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Soon accusations of witchcraft began, friends turned on one another, families turned against each other. In the end 19 people died and 1 pressed to death. But belief alone couldn’t have started the whole hysteria, there are many contributors that could have helped fan the flames. I believe the

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The Crucible is a play written by Arthur Miller. It goes on to accuse multiple people of being a witch. Many people were hung and even put in jail at these times. In the Crucible it takes place in Salem, Massachusetts 1692. As the young girls went through the woods with Tituba (a Barbadian slave) dancing and skipping around.

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Revenge, Everybody has done it. Revenge is defined as’’ the action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands’’. What I believe is that parents of the “suffering” children had an argument with another family. This resulted in the parents to blame the others of being witches or conjurers. It was the perfect way to get revenge and nobody would suspect it.

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Add to that the stress and insecurity of being brought up in an unstable home, which only makes them more expedient to blame. Unnecessary death due to faulty witch accusations also happens when social misfits are targeted. This problem is extremely prevalent in Ghana, where “outspoken or eccentric women... accused of witchcraft... [are] forced to live out their days together in witch camps” (Whitaker 1). Women like this often do not have family and friends

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So now everyone is scared and freaking out which is really the start of the mass hysteria. It turns into everyone accusing others of being a witch. Whether it be because they don’t like them or just because they want their land. Either way they start accusing everyone, and the girls were seen as “proof.” So, if they didn’t like the person, when they were brought into court they would start screaming, falling or even “fainting.”

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When the girls were presented with the punishment of hanging, they started playing the victim and accuse others to save themselves. Fear made the girls turn on one another and endanger many others. They sparked fear in each other and in the town by admitting to witchcraft and accusing those around them to save their necks for a small while longer. When humans and communities mix these emotions together the result is disastrous.

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