Nope, this is not a headline from Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. People really did put to death a woman accused of being a witch in 2013. A town in Papua New Guinea, which is in the South Pacific Islands, publicly tortured and then murdered a 20-year-old woman by setting her on fire in a public square. The government and local police condemned this act of violence against women, but that didn’t stop it from happening: the young mother had been accused of sorcery by the family of a six-year-old child who had recently died and townspeople took matters into their own hands. The details of how she was killed are grisly and gross and I won’t recap them here. Alas, the embassy in Papua New Guinea has called for a closer look into gender-based violence and police are pursuing the as-many-as-50-suspects who had a hand in putting the young mom to death. This barbarity is frankly disgusting. [ABC News]
