A type of violence usually committed against women has increasingly targeted men.
Speaking with Live Science, Anthropologist Dan Jorgensen of the University of Western Ontario described seven cases that involved the killings, beatings and gruesome torture of male victims. The cases, which occurred near the village of Telefomin, which he said may hold clues to the roots of violence.
In the new report, Jorgensen said six cases of male victims are between ages 35 and 65, and one case of an attack on a 16-year-old boy. Three of the victims were killed in the attacks.
One of the survivors, Thomas (not his real name), a deacon in his 60s from the nearby village of Talavip, was passing through that area with his two sons when he was assaulted.(Jorgensen used pseudonyms for all the victims mentioned in the report to protect their identities.)
"They beat me and my sons with iron rods and covered me with [oil]," Thomas told Jorgensen. "One of them lit a match and almost killed me, but someone told him that if he did, he would die, too, so they didn't set fire to me."
Violence related to witchcraft and sorcery allegations in Papua New Guinea has attracted media attention in the last decade, and has even acquired its own acronym: SRK, for "sorcery-related killing."
The violence In February 2013, a young mother was publicly tortured and burned alive; in April 2013, a retired female schoolteacher was tortured and publicly beheaded. The government reacted by introducing legislation to punish the perpetrators of such crimes.
Jorgensen reports, the violence against men in Telefomin may not stem from old beliefs about witches. But the perpetrators are believed to be a group of young men who dropped out of school and remain unemployed. The locals refer to these men as "the Boys."
A conflict between the Boys and the community — triggered by the lack of educational or economic opportunities and likely fueled by their drug use — may instead be the real reason behind the attacks.
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