This is interesting, and possibly not something that enters our thoughts everyday (or even once a month for that matter). Apparently, in our dear country, Satanic crime is a growing problem.

But seriously.

“The girls were in their school uniforms, lying just a few feet from each other, with cuts and open wounds on their backs, necks, and arms, just out of view from the row of stout brick houses that border the field. Next to the girls were three black candles and two unused razor blades.”

These two girls had been warned about their impending death, said TV reporter Malungelo Booi.

Between December 2013 and February 2014, 78 similar cases were reported, ranging from missing body parts to “screwed up rituals”.

“Focus was on how the media perpetuated these fringe beliefs of a sudden, calamitous emergence of devil-worshipping teenagers, creating what is commonly seen as a moral—or, in this case, satanic—panic.”

Nicky Falkof, a lecturer in media studies at Wits, has written academically about the subject. She says that “the alleged rise of Satanism in the 1980s was being blamed for increasing divorce rates, feminism, kids using drugs, and kids not wanting to go to the army”, and that Satanism then “suddenly disappeared”. This Satanism, however, was more focused on South Africa’s white population.

The reappearance of it more recently has been occurring mostly in black communities, such as the above mentioned story.

“But now, because the secularization of the state has forced religion to be removed from education, it has opened a gap, a vacuum. And because nature does not allow a vacuum, something has come in to close that vacuum.”

So, beware, if you do not have a strong belief system: there is a big hole in your soul that Satan could fill.

But the debate goes further: Is this all the work of the Devil, or is it the results of economic disparity? With very few of the promises of 1994 actually being delivered on, the blame can be put onto communities having no proper housing and the poor chances of getting a job.

Read the full story on Vice.