Social media still a scary place for real witches in the closet

This holiday season is supposed to be one where witches get to come out to play. But around the world, many real witches are still hiding in the broom closet. In Canada, the number of people who openly identify with a pagan faith has been steadily on the rise.

According to Kerr Cuhulain, pagan author and retired pagan police officer in Sechelt, B.C., the dangers faced by modern pagans have decreased proportional to the access we all have to accurate information. An employer is less likely to be able to fire someone who wears a pentacle to work, and family court judges who use pagan practices as a reason to discriminate in custody cases face challenges from pagan rights groups across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. “It just can’t happen these days,” Cuhulain said in an interview with Yahoo Canada. “And if it does, there’s an organization ready to fight it.”

Pagan organizations for specific professions as well as for general advocacy have ensured that there are fewer legal barriers for pagans to face, in courts or in the workplace.

But that hasn’t stopped the discrimination they still face on social media. Facebook’s “real name policy” is a particularly damaging way that Wiccans and witches are still targeted.

Last year when the name policy first gained mass media coverage, Sister Krissy Fiction told The Wild Hunt: “There is a long tradition of using chosen names within our [Pagan] communities. That exists partly to help protect from possible discrimination, but also because we recognize that there is power in chosen names and we value being able to decide what image we are going to present to the world. The reality is though, that if Facebook doesn’t change the policy, we run the same risk of one individual fueled by spite being able to shut down hundreds of profiles. Sure, this time around it was drag queens and Sisters, but it could have just as easily been someone who doesn’t like Pagans who decided to go on a reporting spree.”

“There are lots of valid reasons why people might not want to use their legal name on Facebook,” The Gnostic Pagan and Prioress of the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence explained. This includes women like Rachel* who used Facebook under a pseudonym to keep herself and her family safe from an abusive ex-partner. Five years ago, when she registered on Facebook and her account name didn’t match her ID, she specifically discussed the danger she faced with someone from customer service and her account was approved without hesitation.

Like many pagans who don’t have real-life connections to other witches, Rachel, who lives in the Berkshire tri-state area of the U.S., eagerly reached out to others online for support. Though not especially comfortable or well-versed in Facebook’s privacy policies, she joined a number of spiritual groups and engaged in theological discussions in the hopes of finding like-minded friends. Instead, she said “it started turning ugly. [I was] being attacked and downright abused,” Rachel told Yahoo Canada in an email. After reporting and blocking the members harassing her, she found herself suddenly barred from accessing her account.

Though many of the well-known activists and artists who initially complained about the Real Name Policy have since had their accounts reactivated, Rachel says her questions remain unanswered. “Facebook did nothing!” she said. “Not one thing.”

While Rachel’s experience may not be a common reality for modern pagans in North America, she faces real danger thanks to targeting like that described on satirical Christian forum Landover Baptist Church.

These attacks, cruel and dangerous as they are, still pale in comparison to the real life witch hunts happening around the world. In some places on earth, just being called a witch can be a life or death situation, whether it’s true or not.

Cuhulain pointed out that access to a connected world has allowed Western culture to develop a greater understanding of paganism, helping to alleviate the fear of Satanic Panic that preoccupied parents and law enforcement at the end of the last century. In countries where fear of the magical and the mystical still prevails, however, connectivity is doing a great deal of harm.

Nong Ben, a rural village Thailand, has a population of just over 3,000 people. When a mysterious illness prompted gossip of one villager’s involvement in the occult, the connected world didn’t help to dispel those rumors. Instead, as VICE reported, the Facebook post accusing 46-year-old Lek of black magic was seen by more than three million people.

She was shunned, bullied and harassed for months. “Lek's effort to combat ostracization in her village lasted for the better part of a year,” VICE reported. “With scant assistance from local leaders, she was forced to marshal help from government officials outside the village, and she eventually threatened to sue those who published the accusatory post on Facebook.” Finally allowed back into her village, Lek is at least safe from the violent persecution faced in other parts of Asia and Africa.

In Ghana, women who are powerful or unpopular are banished to squalor camps without food or clean water after being accused of practicing witchcraft. Often children from their family are forced to accompany them.

“Northern Ghana has six witch camps that have been in existence for more than 100 years, accommodating 800 accused witches — almost all of them women — and 500 relatives sent by families to take care of them,” reported the Toronto Star in 2010. While the camps were scheduled to be closed in 2012, earlier this year CBC reported on the ongoing problems that women and children in witch camps faced trying to return to their homes. In several countries, crowds have taken to real-life witch-hunts when community members have been accused of sorcery, executing vigilante death sentences.

Perhaps here in Canada, Halloween has dulled our fear of witches and wizards, making room for the words to be reclaimed among pagans, empowering activists to fight for the right to practice in peace. Let’s not forget, though, that across the world and here at home, the word “witch” isn’t a symbol of pointy hats and black cats, or even a sign of freedom and magic, but a mark of the daily harassment, assault and even death faced by women who just don’t fit in.