India, Sept. 2 -- A woman is called a witch. A crowd gathers, she is humiliated, beaten, ostracised, driven from her home, dispossessed of her land-or killed.

We often call the final act witch-hunting. But that is where our understanding of this violence goes wrong. Witch-hunting is not merely an act of murder or assault. The accusation itself often initiates a continuum of violence involving humiliation, social exclusion, dispossession, intimidation and, in extreme cases, death. Women who are widowed, elderly, isolated or socially vulnerable are disproportionately targeted. It is one of the most brutal forms of gender-based violence and it is rarely an individual act rather than collective actions with the involvement of the entire comm...