Child cannibalism
Child cannibalism or fetal cannibalism is the act of eating a child or fetus. Children who are eaten or at risk of being eaten are a recurrent topic in myths, legends, and folktales from many parts of the world. False accusations of the murder and consumption of children were made repeatedly against minorities and groups considered suspicious, especially against Jews as part of blood libel accusations.
Actual cases of child cannibalism have been documented, especially during severe famines in various parts of the world. Cannibalism sometimes also followed infanticide, the killing of unwanted infants. In several societies that recognized slavery, enslaved children were at risk of being killed for consumption. Some serial killers who murdered children and teenagers are known or suspected to have subsequently eaten parts of their bodies – examples include Albert Fish and Andrei Chikatilo.
In recent decades, rumours and newspaper reports of the consumption of aborted fetuses in China and Hong Kong have attracted attention and inspired controversial artworks. Cannibalism of children is also a motive in some works of fiction and movies, most famously Jonathan Swift's satire A Modest Proposal, which proposed eating the babies of the poor as a supposedly well-intended means of reforming society.
Mythology and folktales
Children who are eaten or at risk of being eaten are a recurrent topic in mythology and folktales from many parts of the world.Greek mythology
In Greek mythology, several of the major gods were actually eaten as children by their own father or just barely escaped such a fate. Cronus, once the most powerful of the gods, was dismayed by a prophecy telling him that he would one day be deposed by one of his children, just as he had formerly overthrown his own father. So as not to suffer the same fate, Cronus decided to consume all his children right after birth. But his wife and sister Rhea, unwilling to see all her children suffer such a fate, handed him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes after the birth of Zeus, their sixth child.Apparently not noticing the difference in taste, he devoured the stone, allowing infant Zeus to grow up at some secret hiding place without his father having any idea that a threat to his power was still alive. Once grown, Zeus tricked his father into drinking an emetic that made him disgorge Zeus's swallowed siblings Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. Being immortal gods they had survived being eaten and had indeed grown to adulthood within their father's stomach. Understandably annoyed at their father's behaviour, the siblings then rose up against Cronus, overthrowing him and the other Titans in a huge war known as the Titanomachy, thus fulfilling the prophecy.
File:Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae- Atreus Farnese MET DP870243.jpg|thumb|upright=0.85|left|Atreus carries one of Thyestes's sons off in order to cook him – 1574 engraving by Antonio Lafreri and Cornelis Cort
Other Greek myths tell of children killed and served to their clueless parents in an act of revenge. Learning that his brother Thyestes had committed adultery with his wife Aerope, Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes's sons, serving their flesh to their father and revealing afterwards the hands and heads of the murdered boys, shocking Thyestes into realizing what he had eaten. Tereus is another mythic father who ate the flesh of his son Itys without knowing it. In his case, his wife Procne killed and cooked her own child to punish her husband for the rape and mutilation of her sister Philomela. A variant of this myth was also told about Polytechnus and the sisters Aëdon and Chelidon. King Demophon of Elaeus was served wine mixed with the blood of his daughters in revenge for sacrificing another nobleman's daughter in order to end the plague that was tormenting the city.
Tantalus murdered and boiled his own son Pelops, serving his flesh to several gods in an arrogant challenge to their omniscience. But they saw through his act and brought the boy back to life, though one of them, Demeter, had absent-mindedly already eaten part of his shoulder.
Lamia was a queen who had an affair with Zeus but became insane when his wife Hera killed or kidnapped her children to punish her for the adultery. To make up for her loss, she started to kidnap any children she could find, killing and devouring them.
Bible episodes and Christian legends
The Bible contains several episodes of children being eaten by their own mothers and sometimes fathers during severe famines. Possibly the most well known of them is about two women who made a survival pact during a siege of Samaria: "first they will kill and eat one woman's son, then the other's". After the first child had been eaten, however, the second mother hid her own son, prompting the first woman to appeal to the king that he make the other woman keep her part of the bargain. The king, much dismayed at the state into which the population had fallen, "tore his clothes" rather than responding to the woman's request.Child cannibalism also plays a role in some Christian legends. One of the miracle stories told about the 4th-century bishop Saint Nicholas is that he brought three children back to life who had been killed by a butcher during a terrible famine. The butcher had pickled their flesh in brine in order to sell it as pork; however, Nicholas, upon spotting the barrel, recognized what was really inside and resurrected the butchered children by making the sign of the cross.
European folktales
The consumption of children is a topic of many European folk and fairy tales. In the German fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, a witch entraps and tries to eat a pair of abandoned siblings, but Gretel kills her by pushing her into her own preheated oven. The Norwegian tale Buttercup is also about a witch trying to eat a child, but with a darker twist, since here the little boy, Buttercup, manages to save himself by killing the witch's daughter and boiling her body for the mother to eat. The witch eats the soup, thinking it "Buttercup broth", while it is actually "Daughter broth", as he comments triumphantly.File:Puss in Boots.jpg|upright=1.15|thumb|Puss in Boots confronting an ogre who is dining on human babies and whole animals
In the French tale Hop-o'-My-Thumb it is an ogre rather than a witch who tries to eat children. In the English fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk, a giant wants to eat a little boy "for breakfast", since "there's nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast", but the boy manages to trick and kill the giant and becomes wealthy by stealing his property. Similar tales were recorded in other countries, including Italy.
The Juniper Tree is a dark German fairy tale in which a young boy is killed and cooked by his own stepmother, who serves his flesh to her clueless husband. Other fairy tales, most famously Little Red Riding Hood, feature anthropomorphized animals eating human children, but this is not actually cannibalism, as eater and eaten belong to different species.
Baba Yaga is a supernatural being in Slavic folklore who appears as a deformed or ferocious-looking woman and likes to dine on children.
Ritual practice accusations
Since the 12th century, Jews were repeatedly accused of murdering children in order to use their blood in religious rituals. Often this antisemitic canard included the charge that the blood was used for the baking of matzah eaten during Passover. In Muslim countries, such blood libels are still sometimes repeated in the 21st century.During the witch-hunts in the early modern period, women suspected of witchcraft were repeatedly charged with killing, roasting, and eating babies in Satanic rituals. In a Satanic panic starting in the 1980s in the United States, thousands of people have been wrongly accused of abusing children in Satanic rituals, sometimes including claims that the victims were murdered and eaten. No evidence for such acts ever happening in such a context has been found.
Historical accounts
Famines
In severe famines, when all other provisions were exhausted, starving people repeatedly turned to cannibalism, eating the corpses of the deceased or deliberately killing others – most often children – for consumption. Two factors put children specifically at risk: they could be more "easily snatched" and killed than adults and their flesh was often considered "more palatable" than that of the latter. Famines bad enough to lead to the consumption of human flesh were usually caused either by natural disasters such as droughts or by wars and other social conflicts.Europe
There are reports of the consumption of children from various European famines. In 409 CE, the Visigoths under Alaric I laid siege to Rome, conquering and sacking it in the following year. According to St. Jerome's account, the siege led to a cruel famine, in which "the starving people had recourse to hideous food and tore each other limb from limb that they might have flesh to eat. Even the mother did not spare the babe at her breast." In the same year, the Suebi invaded Iberia, with their plundering leading to widespread famine. Facing starvation, some parents killed their own children for food. In 536, during a famine under the rule of the Ostrogoths in Italy, papal records recount that in the region of Liguria, some mothers ate their children due to extreme hunger. Similar incidents were recorded in 539 in the Emilia-Romagna region.In the early 11th century, a famine that lasted five years devastated much of Europe, reportedly driving some starving mothers to consume their own infants. During another pan-European famine from 1032 to 1035, affecting countries from Greece to France and Britain, numerous instances of cannibalism were recorded. Many children were lured away with as little as an apple and eaten, according to chronicler Rodulfus Glaber, who wrote about both these famines.
In 1438, near the end of the Hundred Years' War, a woman in Abbeville, France, was found to have killed and dismembered two children and preserved their corpses in salt to face off starvation. During the siege of Sancerre, France, in 1572–1573, some of the starving inhabitants resorted to cannibalism. In one household, Jean de Léry saw the dismembered body of a three-year-old girl; some parts were boiling in a pot on the fire, while others had apparently already been consumed. The girl's mother assured that the child had died of natural reasons.
The Nine Years' War caused a severe famine in Ireland in the late 17th century. Several young children were entrapped, killed and eaten, with only their skulls and bones remaining for the authorities to retrieve. At least one child suffered the same fate during an earlier famine in the mid-17th century, according to court documents.