Human Rights Groups Condemn Killing of Women in Papua New Guinea Over Sorcery Accusations

Human rights organizations are demanding urgent action from Papua New Guinea’s government following the killing of a young woman accused of sorcery — the latest in a pattern of brutal, sometimes fatal violence targeting women blamed for deaths or illnesses in their communities.

A Killing That Drew International Outrage

The case that has galvanized international attention involved a 20-year-old woman, Kepari Leniata, who was accused by relatives of a young boy of using witchcraft to cause his death. According to Amnesty International’s account of the case, Leniata was stripped, tied up, doused in petrol, and burned alive by the boy’s relatives — an act of mob violence carried out with a level of public visibility that shocked observers well beyond Papua New Guinea’s borders. Two people were subsequently charged in connection with the killing, though rights groups have long noted that arrests in sorcery-related violence cases remain the exception rather than the rule.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident

What makes cases like Leniata’s so difficult to address, human rights advocates say, is that they reflect an established and recurring pattern rather than a single aberrant crime. Sorcery accusation-related violence — often abbreviated SARV by researchers and advocacy groups tracking the phenomenon — typically emerges in the aftermath of an unexpected death or illness within a community, when grieving or frightened relatives look for someone to blame. Women, particularly widows or others lacking a family network capable of protecting them, bear the overwhelming majority of the violence that follows, according to findings later highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women.

The mechanics of the violence follow a disturbingly consistent script across documented cases: accused women are frequently stripped, bound, tortured with knives or heated metal, and in the most extreme cases, burned or beheaded, often in front of members of their own community. A gender specialist for the Pacific Islands Forum, testifying years later before a Papua New Guinea parliamentary committee investigating the issue, described accused women as “often tortured, often cut, sexually violated,” with their clothing removed and their captivity sometimes extending for days, according to Human Rights Watch’s reporting on the broader pattern.

Legal Reform Follows Public Outrage

The intensity of international and domestic reaction to cases like Leniata’s has, over time, produced concrete legal change. Papua New Guinea’s parliament voted to repeal the country’s Sorcery Act in the wake of the public outcry her killing generated — a law that had, until that point, allowed a defendant to raise a genuine belief in sorcery as a partial legal defense, effectively functioning as a mitigating factor in murder cases rather than a warning sign of premeditated mob violence.

Rights advocates have consistently argued that legal reform alone cannot resolve a problem this deeply rooted in local belief systems and, just as importantly, in Papua New Guinea’s broader crisis of gender-based violence and law enforcement impunity. Subsequent Human Rights Watch investigations documented additional attacks in the years following the Sorcery Act’s repeal, including a case in which a woman accused of causing her own husband’s death was tied up and tortured with hot iron rods by his relatives, and another in which police rescued two women from a group of roughly 20 men who had already inflicted severe burns and knife wounds before intervention arrived.

The Defenders Who Take On the Risk

Compounding the challenge, those who step forward to defend accused women often become targets themselves. Human rights defenders working directly with survivors have described facing direct threats and intimidation for their advocacy — a danger the United Nations and European Union later moved to address through the Spotlight Initiative, a joint program aimed at protecting defenders working on sorcery-related and broader gender-based violence cases across Papua New Guinea’s highland provinces, where such violence remains most concentrated.

For rights advocates working the issue on the ground, the central challenge remains one of prevention rather than response: by the time a woman is publicly accused and a mob begins to form, meaningful intervention becomes exponentially harder, and often arrives, if it arrives at all, only after serious injury or death has already occurred.

This piece discusses graphic violence against women. For related coverage of gender-based rights struggles internationally, browse our full Policy & Rights archive.