The Salem Witch Trials

I don’t know if the Salem witch trials get taught in public schools anymore, or if the events get swept away, or if the focus is on the men that prosecuted the people accused of being witches, which it generally seems to be the case these days.  I don’t give the men a free pass.

However, it is interesting to note who the accusers were.  No, let me correct that, it is interesting to note who the false accusers were.  They were girls.

150 people were arrested and imprisoned.  Fourteen women and five men were hanged for the crime of witchcraft.  One man was crushed to death.  Five more died in prison.  Twenty-five people died because of false accusations made by some petty girls.

The first four girls to make the accusations are Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, cousins, Ann Putnam and Elizabeth Hubbard.  The first three people they accuse are Sarah Good, Sarah Osbourne and Tituba.  Despite the current spin that the witchcraft accusations were part of some patriarchal plot to take the land of single land holding women, the first three women are poor, Tituba is in fact a slave.

Whatever later motivation there may have been, this was obviously not the case in the beginning accusations.  The next accusation was against Martha Corey, a woman that openly voiced skepticism about the accusers.  The motivation of the girl’s to accuse her is quite obvious.  Dorthy Good, the fifth one accused was a four year old girl.  At this point we do not have a property motivation for these accusations.

I do not doubt that someone took advantage of the situation. People always do.  What seems obvious though, is that this situation did not start out as a cynical property grab with the girls as a tool.  The girls started it.  The situation begins with them.

It is interesting to note that although several other girls join in on the accusations.  None of the false accusers are boys.

Why?

This argues against the idea that adults were using the children.  A boy would have been just as effective at accusing women of people witches.

There are various psychological explanations that have been attempted: Hysteria, but if that was the case, why only girls?  Wouldn’t at least one boy have been impacted?

Ergotism from the rye bread they ate?

Again why no boys?

Encephalitis lethargica?

Again, certainly some boys would have been impacted.

Sleep paralysis?

Again, why no boys?

That is the troubling issue.  It was girls that made the accusations.  It was girls that sent these people to their death.  A biological cause would have had some evidence in the behavior of the boys.

So it has to be something else.

Greed is out, look at the first victims, that wasn’t the motive.

Religious fervor would have been something the boys would get caught up in too.

Something that society doesn’t really want to admit.  Something that all those looking at the accusers, wanted to explain away and tried to with unsatisfactory results .

The accusations were made by girls and there is no explanation for it other than the girls wanted to do it.  They enjoyed doing it.  They could have stopped at any time.  Yet 150 go to prison, even more get accused and several of them die.

The reason for the girl’s behavior can be found here, or perhaps a better way of putting it, more of the behavior can be found at this site.  False rape claims make up to anywhere around 60% of all reported rapes (when the typical false report rate for all other crimes is around 2-4%) and the reasons for them are ample:  from mere spite, to trying to save the woman’s reputation, or merely because a cab driver wouldn’t let them smoke in a cab.

You read that last line right.  There’s the cab driver in Edmonton that got falsely accused of rape by four girls and the only thing that saved him was the hidden camera in his vehicle.

The only thing that saved him.

The ancient rules in many cultures said that it took four female witnesses to equal one male witness may have had a very real, practical reason for existing.  That the amount of false accusations many women are willing to make, that have extreme, permanent, life destroying consequences are too many to ignore and have a system of justice survive.

We have not progressed past the Salem Witch Trials, they have just taken a different form in our society.

Someday historians will look back on our culture, upon the number of innocent lives destroyed over the whims of women.  Many more lives than the 150 of the Salem witch trials, and they will argue over why and how this could happen.

None of the reasons will satisfy.