CHILDREN’S INVOLVEMENT AND ROLE IN EUROPEAN WITCH TRIALS
This paper considers children’s involvement in witch trials in Europe. Since the sixteenth century, a significant number of young men and children had been put on trial accused of witchcraft. Children were engage in the trials primarily as witnesses, who testified against their neighbors, friends, relatives, brothers and sisters and even their own parents. Some of them accused themselves of witchcraft. Witch children trials took place in almost all European countries: France and Spain, Switzerland and Italy, Germany and Scotland, England and Sweden; and even in the so-called New World. Children aged three, five, seven and twelve years were first interviewed by adults (their parents, pastors, teachers) and then were questioned in court. They were chained and put in prison, threatened and tortured. Many of them had died while tortured.