Policing sorcery accusation related violence in Papua New Guinea

This chapter describes how the police in Papua New Guinea (PNG) respond to sorcery accusations and related violence (SARV). In so doing, it opens a portal through which the relationship between the police, the state and the public can be viewed and analysed. SARV offers a unique angle from which to view these relationships because it often involves a clear conflict between differing conceptions of what actions are in the public interest and what constitutes a source of insecurity. At its most extreme, SARV pits an entire community convinced of the need to torture and kill the sorcerer (or witch), whom they believe has killed and may kill again, against a state whose laws proscribe the death penalty for those who take such actions. The police, as one interviewee neatly put it, are the “meat in the sandwich”. This chapter first investigates the successive challenges the police in PNG face when seeking to police SARV. Like much of the literature in this area, it highlights the vast array of difficulties faced by the police – including their lack of sufficient personnel, training, resourcing and oversight. It also describes the particular problems SARV presents on top of this familiar litany of problems – the moral dilemmas faced by police officers when they themselves are convinced of the reality of the sorcery claims, and the risks to their own lives from the mob violence that often accompanies SARV incidents. In such a context, there are competing conceptions of security at play – the security of the community in terms of needing to be protected from potential supernatural harm, and the security of individuals needing to be protected from stigmatisation and attacks following accusations of sorcery. Not only does this pit individual security against public security, it also pits a magical world-view against a secular/scientific one. The chapter then steps away from a “deficit lens” approach to policing and turns to describing a number of strategies used by those police who do respond effectively to SARV. Many of these strategies revolve around the non-policing relationships and resources that the police officers possess as members of clans and tribes, as members and leaders of different Christian congregations, as supporters of particular political factions and as participants and leaders in a wide range of community leadership roles.