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Witchcraft is a belief that can cause significant harm, not necessarily through supernatural means, but through real-world violence. Accusations often lead to severe physical attacks, including persecution, psychological distress, and human rights abuses against accused individuals, with international bodies highlighting witchcraft accusations as a major cause of human rights abuses, with victims needing protection and reparations. , who may face social ostracization, with the accused often banished or shunned, disrupting their lives and families. , beatings, mutilation, torture, and murder, often by community members. Accused individuals experience immense emotional distress, social isolation, self-doubt, and long-term trauma while also serving to explain misfortune, such as illness, where unexplained illnesses, mental health issues (like epilepsy or psychosis), or bad luck are often blamed on witchcraft, diverting attention from real causes and harming the accused within communities. 

Historically, and even today, people (especially women, children, and the elderly) accused of witchcraft have suffered extreme harm, for example during the Salem Witch Hunts which occurred primarily in 1692, beginning in February with the first accusations and arrests of The first three women – Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne – were formally accused and arrested after the girls pointed to them as witches, as well as two young girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, who started exhibiting strange behaviors, leading to their parents seeking supernatural explanations with the accusations spreading, a special court (Court of Oyer and Terminer) was established, and the first executions (like Bridget Bishop's in June) took place on Gallows Hill when Governor William Phips dissolved the special court as public opinion turned against the trials and by 1993 A new court tried remaining cases, and the trials officially ended by May, with most prisoners released largely concluding the salum whitch hunt by May 1693, resulting in the execution of 19 people and the imprisonment or accusation of over 200 others in colonial Massachusetts. even as some folk practices, like using foxglove (digitalis), had medicinal benefits.