This book started badly for me. It got better but, let down by the variable quality of the contributions, left a sense of disappointment at the end. The cover shows two miserable and poor-looking Black children surrounded by a group of Black adults staring at them. When my 12-year-old daughter looked at this cover and said, ‘Oh those poor African children, I feel sorry for them’, I thought, ‘Oh dear, another book that paints ethnic minorities as backward, with their children in need of saving’. But as I started reading I was pleasantly surprised to find a much more nuanced analysis.

The book tries to shed light on recent distressing revelations that have hit the headlines in British papers about the (sometimes fatal) abuse of children who have been accused by their carers of being possessed by dangerous demonic powers. Bringing together contributions from academics from social sciences, psychiatry and anthropology backgrounds, with traditional practitioners, social workers, police and others is both a strength and a problem in this book. It is a strength for the breadth of different perspectives, but a problem because the accounts vary considerably in style, scholarly evaluation and quality of writing, making it difficult to put the book down having arrived at some coherent understanding of the topic.

Many of the contributions come from two conferences organised by ‘Inform’, an organisation based at the London School of Economics and Political Science and supported by a number of organisations including the British government, with the aim of providing information about minority religions, faith movements and spiritual communities. The book is divided into three parts, each with several chapters. The first part, ‘The meaning of possession’, looks at ‘possession states’ in different traditions and how these have changed historically across cultures. The second part, ‘Possession as contact with the divine’, includes personal accounts of becoming ‘possessed’ by ‘supernatural’ entities. The third part, ‘Children accused’, deals specifically with possession in children.

Overall, I think the book strives to reach a balanced view, neither minimising the potential dangers of children being accused of possession or witchcraft, nor exaggerating the likelihood of this happening and always striving to keep this phenomenon within a broader context. It seems that it is relatively new and something that has developed in the context of some communities struggling with severely disrupted social and community cohesion.