Film on Trokosi to hit the entertainment scene

Accra, Sept. 12, GNA - Mr Bruno Pischiutta, President and Chief Executive Officer of Canadian-based Toronto Pictures, on Monday urged government to enforce laws on ritual servitude as prescribed by law. He also advised the public to report to the police any group of people, family or fetish priests that attempted to send or receive young girls as objects of atonement.

The Criminal Code makes practitioners of customary and ritual servitude such as fetish priests, parents and traditional leaders, culpable for giving their consent to the practice.

Anybody who contravenes this law is guilty of second-degree felony and should be sentenced to a term of not less than three years imprisonment.

Mr Pischiutta, an internationally acclaimed film producer and director, was speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Accra after shooting his latest film, "Punctured Hope," which seeks to raise global awareness regarding the religious and cultural practice of Trokosi, the enslavement of virgin girls to shrines to atone for the "sins" of their relatives.

"Punctured Hope" does not only reveal the startling age-old tribal cultural practice that promoted the continued enslavement, mutilation and sexual abuse of West African young girls and women, but does so with an all-African cast, whose lead actress was a survivor of the culturally embedded religious belief, which had affected millions of African women over the past 300 years.

The film also aimed at initiating strategic coalition among international and local stakeholders for the eradication of female ritual servitude.

According to Mr Pischiutta, the film highlighted the plight of over 2,000 women who were still languishing in 'trokosi' shrines as ritual slaves because shrine elders had refused to give up on the practice. "Punctured Hope" dramatizes the de-humanizing and traumatizing experience, both physical and psychological, that victims undergo and questioned the rational for using girls as sacrificial lambs for the sins of their relations. 'Trokosi,' which is practised in parts of the Volta and Greater Accra Regions of Ghana, Togo and Benin, is a system where innocent virgin girls are confined to fetish shrines as reparation to deities for crimes committed by their relatives.

Mr Pischiutta said the production of the film was a step in the right direction and expressed the hope that it would lead to the development of concrete and positive action to put it into mainstream national and international policies.

"It is unfortunate that Africans have to spend so much time and part of national resources in discussing ways of eliminating ritual servitude from respective societies," he said.

"Too many people are steeped in superstitions and ignorance both of which are the causes for most of the customary or traditional practices in Africa," Mr Pischiutta added.