This chapter explains the persecution of women as witches and why, in some societies and times, women are primarily branded and persecuted as witches. The authors use three variables to explain witch hunts: Patriarchy, cultural beliefs, and structural changes within society. First, witch hunts have been used to enforce women's exclusion from highly valued spiritual knowledge and establish patrilineal property regimes. Second, they have been used to enforce social beliefs in the existence of persons, mainly women, who use supernatural power to cause misfortune, (e.g., illness, deaths, bad crops) in their communities. Third, witch hunts have also been used to protect the old moral economy and, at the same time, to promote the new economy of accumulation. Importantly, the authors note some recent expressions of the rejection of such belief in the witches and demand for proof of witchcraft.

How do we deal with witch hunts and the related witchcraft beliefs that underlie them? We deal with it as a contemporary problem, drawing lessons from the end of the witch hunts in early modern Europe. Whether in India or Africa, the colonizers passed laws to punish witch persecutions. Their actions led to the perception that the colonizers were supporters of witches. When the indigenous peoples in central India or African peasants rebelled against colonial rule, their insurgencies were accompanied by internal cleansings of supposed witches. This was so among the Santhal and Munda in India, as also the Maji Maji uprising in Tanzania. It also occurred in the run-up to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Widespread witchcraft beliefs are a precondition for the occurrence of witch hunts. But their manifestation in the form of witch hunts occurs in certain social conditions. The explanatory variables that we listed earlier are (a) a culture of belief in the existence of persons, women, or men who can cause harm through supernatural powers, (b) attempts to define, redefine, or oppose patriarchal norms and roles, and (c) overall structural transformation or socio-economic changes of a major kind in which old norms are replaced or sought to be replaced by new norms. These explanatory variables can be used to understand both the predominance of women in early modern Europe as witch accused, 80 per cent of the total, and also the existence of 20 per cent, a significant number, of men as witch accused (Larner 1981).