Author: Hans Sebald
Hans Sebald is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Arizona State University. This article is based on and partly excerpted from Hans Sebald, Witch-Children: From Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Court Rooms (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1995).
Witch-Children—Then and Now
Questioning children’s innocence is not popular. In a world that agonizes over perennial betrayal, cruelty, war, mass slaughter, and other failures of humanity, we passionately long for exem-plars of unadulterated goodness—and the child, like some sacred icon, has been traditionally placed upon an imaginary altar so that we might revere virtues lacking in ourselves. This …