The lurid accusations and arbitrary punishments meted out in centuries long gone are all too reminiscent of the way young women are harassed and blamed today
If you were tried for witchcraft in early modern Scotland, one of the surest ways to be convicted was to confess. Of course, you didn’t need to confess to be convicted, and confession wasn’t always voluntary. This problem led to a practice called “waking the witch”: a form of torture that involved depriving the accused of sleep for days on end, until they were so exhausted they would hallucinate and babble incoherently. These “ravings” would often later be used as evidence of guilt.
It sounds barbaric and antiquated: accusing a woman of being strange and unnatural, driving her mad with constant prodding, depriving her of sleep. But it also sounds chillingly familiar. I was reminded of a teenage girl I had recently met who, after an incident involving a boy at her school had gone viral on social media, began being bombarded with abuse by her peers. They called her a slut and a slag on multiple internet platforms. They shared embarrassing photographs of her, while forever escalating rumours started to spread. But unlike my own adolescence, when some escape from school could always be found at home, this young woman’s life had become a prison of endless abuse. The alerts and notifications pinged directly to her phone, vibrating through the night, causing her to become more and more panicked as sleep deprivation set in. Having initially rejected the labels others were assigning to her, she started to fear that they were right. It’s hard to hold on to who you are when dozens of people are telling you that you’re worthless. Does this sound like an exaggeration? For thousands of teenage girls across the UK, it isn’t.
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