Three feminist campaigners in the Netherlands want to reclaim the insult “witch” and recognise the innocent victims of Dutch witch-hunts from the 15th to the 17th centuries with a national monument.
Susan Smit, Bregje Hofstede and Manja Bedner, the chair and board members of the National Witches Monument foundation, have raised €35,000 (£29,000) for an official site of memory for about 70,000 people who died during a Satanic panic that swept Europe and the Americas.
“It’s about creating more awareness around this history of, basically, femicide,” Hofstede said. “To this day a witch is still a comic figure. In the Netherlands, every year at the carnaval, people burn effigies of witches … but there’s hardly any knowledge of the actual history of people being burned at the stake.”
