How 3 female minors were sent out of their homes‘for being witches’.

Three young girls sent out of their homes by
their families and relations over allegations of
witchcraft, were on Friday rescued by the Child’s
Right and Rehabilitation Network Children Center
in Eket, Cross Rivers state.

CRARN, a center founded in 2003, takes in
children abandoned or sent away by their
families who accuse them of being witches and
bringing ill-luck to the household.

These three particular girls -Esther (13), Blessing
and Ima-, narrated the horrific ordeals they went
through in the hands of relatives and the public
before being sent out of their homes.

According to Esther, the oldest among the girls,
she found the two other girls roaming the
streets, and upon inquiry, she discovered that
they were thrown out of their homes and
abandoned by their parents.

Esther took the girls to her uncle’s house, where
she gave them food. However, on returning from
work, her uncle was much agitated when she
told them about the girls and their misfortunes.

She pleaded with him for them to reconcile the
other two girls with their parents.
Her uncle, however, refused and threw her out of
the house after accusing her (Esther) of being a
witch.

“I was thinking he was going to be happy and try
to help the girls out of their dilemma.

I was
surprised when he pounced on me with anger
and a spank. He asked me to leave his house
immediately, so I left the house and did not
know where to go.”

“While roaming the street in the middle of the
night, and as we sat in an uncompleted building,
Ima came with an idea that we should go to
CRARN Centre, a place she had been about six
years ago. That’s why we came here.”

Ima’s grandmother had thrown her out of their
rented apartment in Ekpene Obo -for being ‘a
witch’.

Ima said she had been in the CRARN center in
2010, at the age of 5 but left the place after she
was reconciled with her grandmother.

According to the young girl, her grandmother
treated her well until a prophet told the older
woman that her grandchild was the witch
responsible for all her misfortunes and business
problems.

Blessing, who is the youngest of the three, said
her ordeal started when she attended a Friday
night prayer session (popularly called Tarry
Night) with her family, and two of her siblings
were kidnapped by gunmen.

A pastor at a church near the Mary Slessor
Health Centre, Effoi – Eket, had told her parents
that she was the cause of their misfortune,
saying that Blessing used her magic power to
cause the kidnapping of her siblings and the
subsequent economic downturn in the family

.

According to Blessing, her family began to treat
her unfairly, torturing and abusing her daily till
she was sent out of the house.

The CRARN Centre manager, Carol Akpan, said
that they had several new cases of children
coming to seek refuge.

Akpan noted that the center could not accept all
the children as some are referred to government
centers or taken back to their communities and
reconciled with their families.