Real Life in Papua New Guinea 2026: B*RNED ALIVE — 400 Witches | Documentary

[00:00:00]Imagine a country where a woman is beaten every 30 seconds.

[00:00:05]Where communities drag their neighbors from their homes, bind them to stakes, and burn them alive and call it justice.

[00:00:14]Where the earth holds one of the richest gold deposits on the planet and the people living on that land earn $5 a day.

[00:00:23]Three facts before we begin. One, Papa New Guinea has the highest rate of intimate partner violence in all of East Asia and the Pacific. More than 1.5 million women are beaten, raped, or assaulted every single year. In a country of 11 million pe two, approximately 400 people, most of them women, are murdered annually by their own communities, accused of witchcraft, burned alive.

[00:00:54]Three. Papua New Guiney's highlands contain archaeological evidence of organized farming that predates the pyramid. The people here have been cultivating this land for 9 years.

[00:01:08]This a country the world has almost entirely forgotten to look at. Real life in Papua New Guinea in 2026 is not what you expect. Stay with me. Chapter 1.

[00:01:20]Violence against women. Stand outside a women's refuge in Port Moresby at 7 in the morning. The building has no sign on the wall. No sign attracts no attention.

[00:01:32]And attention in this city means the men who put these women here might find them again. Through the door, children's voices. A particular silence underneath them. Not the silence of safety. The silence of people who have learned that the wrong sound gets you hurt. Papua New Guinea is not a declared war zone. No bombs, no invading army, no front line you can draw on a map. And yet the numbers from this country read like a combat report. According to a UN Women Demographic and Health Survey, 63% of women in Papua New Guinea, aged 15 to 49, have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner. 63%.

[00:02:18]two out of every three women in this country. Of those women, 61% told no one. No police, no doctor, no family member, nobody.

[00:02:32]Now add this number. A special parliamentary committee on gender-based violence completed a formal government inquiry in 2023. It found that a woman is beaten every 30 seconds in Papa New Guinea. The committee estimated that more than 1.5 million women experience gender-based violence annually in a country of roughly 11 million people.

[00:02:57]That is not a social problem with a committee attached to it. That is a national emergency running without emergency status.

[00:03:05]How did Papua New Guinea arrive here?

[00:03:08]Human Rights Watch documents three structural causes. First, total impunity.

[00:03:15]In 2020, police across Papua New Guinea received 15,444 domestic violence reports. Only 250 cases reached prosecution. Fewer than 100 resulted in conviction. A conviction rate of under 1%.

[00:03:34]When every perpetrator understands correctly that nothing will happen to them, violence does not level off. It escalates.

[00:03:42]Second, institutional collapse.

[00:03:45]Papa New Guiney's own police commissioner told that same parliamentary inquiry that his force cannot keep women and children safe and lacks the resources for thorough investigations.

[00:03:56]Not an advocacy group making that statement. The commissioner of police.

[00:04:02]Third, geography.

[00:04:04]Over 80% of Papa New Guiney's population lives in rural areas. No roads, no courts within a day's walk, no shelters.

[00:04:15]When a woman is beaten in a Highland village 6 hours by foot from the nearest police post, the violence occurs inside a system of complete impunity backed by complete isolation.

[00:04:27]Here is the paradox that should stop you. Papa New Guinea has had formal laws criminalizing rape and domestic violence for decades. Those laws exist in statute books right now.

[00:04:40]And yet, as of February 2024, women hold just 2.7% of parliamentary seats in a country where women grow the majority of food, run the majority of market stalls, and hold communities together in the absence of functioning state services.

[00:04:58]Female majority, political invisibility.

[00:05:01]Her name is Debbie Cowor, international rugby player, professional boxer. In June 2020, her partner beat her with a tire iron and held a gun to her neck.

[00:05:12]The UN resident coordinator issued a personal statement.

[00:05:16]The prime minister condemned the attack.

[00:05:19]Cameras recorded it. Then the cameras moved on. Cowor spoke because she had a platform and a name that journalists recognized. Most women in Papa New Guinea have neither. But the violence inside the home is not the whole story.

[00:05:36]There is a second system failing Papa New Guinea and it reaches every child in the country.

[00:05:43]Chapter 2, the education and health collapse. If gender-based violence doesn't trap you in Papua New Guinea, institutional collapse will. Walk into a government primary school in the Highlands on a Wednesday morning. 50 children, one teacher, no textbooks distributed this year. The roof is corrugated iron when the wet season arrives. The noise of rain makes teaching impossible. The toilet block has no doors for the girl's side, so the girls stop coming. Not once, not occasionally permanently.

[00:06:21]Papua New Guiney's literacy rate sits at approximately 63.4%, 4% one of the lowest in the entire Pacific according to UNESCO.

[00:06:31]Neighboring island nations reach above 90%.

[00:06:35]Papua New Guinea is running 30 points behind in a country that has been formally independent since 1975.

[00:06:43]The World Bank's Papua New Guinea economic update published in May 2024 named this situation a human capital crisis. Their data is stark.

[00:06:56]A child born in Papua New Guinea today can expect to achieve only 37% of their productive potential by age 18 compared to a child with full health and full education. This number called the human capital index ranks Papua New Guinea among the worst performing nations in the Pacific. This is not a gap to be slowly closed over time. The World Bank called it a crisis.

[00:07:22]now layer the health system over the education system.

[00:07:27]Papa New Guinea carries one of the highest tuberculosis burdens in the Western Pacific. The WH global TB report 2023 documented approximately 41,000 new TB cases annually in Papa New Guinea, including drugresistant strains. In a country where fewer than half a percent of the population has access to a trained doctor, where rural hospitals sometimes operate without electricity, without clean water, and without medication supplies that didn't expire last year.

[00:08:03]And here is the number that should put all of this into a single frame. Only 13% of Papua New Guiney's population has electricity at home.

[00:08:14]13%.

[00:08:16]This is not a postconlict state, not a country at war. A nation of 11 million people in 2026 where eight out of 10 households go to sleep in the dark.

[00:08:29]Schools without lights cannot teach night literacy programs. Clinics without power cannot refrigerate vaccines.

[00:08:36]Hospitals without electricity cannot operate.

[00:08:41]In January 2024, the margin between function and collapse showed its true width. A payroll processing error sent PNG police and military officers dramatically underpaid wages. Officers who had not been properly paid went into the streets. Looting erupted across Port Moresby. Six people died. Hospitals were stripped of medical supplies within hours.

[00:09:10]The World Bank's subsequent economic report cited the episode as a direct drag on growth and as a textbook symptom of how fragile every public institution in Papua New Guinea actually is. One payroll error, one afternoon, the health care system of a capital city emptied.

[00:09:31]Papua New Guinea is not a country without resources. It has gold, copper, natural gas, reefs, generating billions in fisheries and tourism potential.

[00:09:44]What it does not have is a functioning system that converts those resources into schools with books, clinics with medicine, and roads that let you reach either one.

[00:09:56]What country are you watching this from right now? Drop it in the comments below. I'm genuinely curious where you all are watching from. I read every single one. Chapter 3, Sanguma.

[00:10:10]But now we reach the fact that has been waiting since the beginning of this video. We leave Port Moresby. We leave the shelters without signs and the schools without textbooks. We travel inland into Enga Province, Hila Province, the Western Highlands, places of fog draped ridgeel lines, gardens cut into hillsides so steep you grip the ground just to stand still. No paved road for the last 4 hours, no phone signal, no police post within walking distance. No hospital within a day.

[00:10:43]Here, tradition runs deeper than law, deeper than government, deeper than anything introduced from outside in the last century. This is where Papua New Guiney's most disturbing practice operates in 2026. Hold this scene in your mind. A woman in her 50s, a grandmother, someone who has farmed this hillside her entire life. Last week, a child in the village died of malaria. A man drowned in the river. A crop failed without a visible explanation. The community gathers. They identify the cause. Not bacteria, not bad weather, not chance.

[00:11:22]Her. She is a sanguma, a witch. She caused the death and she must be punished. What follows is not private.

[00:11:33]It is not quiet. It is public. She is stripped, tied. The community brings hot metal and machetes. The torture can last hours. It can last days. In the most documented cases, cases with photographs, court records, named witnesses, it ends in burning.

[00:11:55]According to the United Nations, approximately 400 people are murdered annually in Papua New Guinea due to sorcery accusations per year. every year.

[00:12:08]Australian National University researcher Miranda Foresight, who has studied this for two decades, documented more than 600 people killed and 340 wounded in witchcraft related attacks over a single 20-year research period.

[00:12:23]And she states explicitly that these are significant underounts because fear of retaliation prevents most incidents from being reported at all.

[00:12:34]Since 2015, one activist in Enga province, Dixant Tand, has personally helped rescue more than 600 women and children from active sorcery attacks. He gave an interview to Alazera in August 2022.

[00:12:51]His most recent rescue, he told the journalist, had happened the previous weekend, not 1980, not 2010, last weekend. The history of this matters.

[00:13:05]Pre-colonial communities across Papua New Guinea used the concept of sorcery called sanguma, purip puri or mala depending on the language group to explain misfortune and to negotiate social conflict. Violence was not absent but community elders, compensation payments and mediation structures moderated it.

[00:13:29]Australian National University research published in 2020 confirmed that the current extreme violence, the public burning, the sexual torture, the killing in broad daylight in front of children represents a dramatic departure from earlier traditions. More brutal, more gendered, and spreading. Enga province had no documented sorcery attack cases before 2010. By 2022, it had become one of the worst affected regions in the country.

[00:14:05]The Papua New Guinea government passed the Sorcery National Action Plan in 2015, allocating $2.9 million for education and awareness programs.

[00:14:17]ANU researchers found it achieved little due to inconsistent funding and absent enforcement targets. The 1971 Sorcery Act, which had formally permitted sorcery as a legal defense in court, effectively legitimizing the belief system that drives these killings, was repealed in 2013.

[00:14:39]The violence did not decrease. It expanded into new geographic areas.

[00:14:46]In March 2023, the United Nations condemned two separate incidents in Papua, New Guinea within a single 24-hour period. Four school cleaners tortured for alleged sorcery in Pgera and a primary school girl taken as a sex slave in Hela Province.

[00:15:06]The UN resident coordinator said directly, "It is unacceptable that in the 21st century, so many women and young girls are living in fear simply because of their gender."

[00:15:18]And here is the paradox that demands your full attention.

[00:15:24]Papa New Guinea is 96% Christian. The church, Catholic, Lutheran, Evangelical, is the most consistently present institution in rural PNG. More present than hospitals, more present than police, more present than schools.

[00:15:42]And yet, some community pastors have been documented as complicit in sorcery attacks, either failing to intervene or actively participating in identifying accused women. a 96% Christian nation burning grandmothers alive for witchcraft in 2026.

[00:16:03]These two facts exist in the same country, in the same village, sometimes on the same morning. Should practices rooted in traditional belief, regardless of country, regardless of religion, be protected as cultural heritage when they end in public torture and death? Drop your answer below. This debate is worth having.

[00:16:31]In September 2024, tribal conflict between two groups, the Panda and Sakar, competing over access to informal mining territories near Porgera, killed at least 32 people. Bareric Gold suspended operations. The Papua New Guinea government declared a state of emergency and issued shoot tokill orders for security forces deployed to contain the violence.

[00:16:58]Human Rights Watch documented across multiple years of investigation that Porggera's own mine security personnel carried out extrajudicial killings and violent abuses against illegal miners and local residents. Those findings are on record. No prosecutions followed.

[00:17:17]Further west, the Octetti mine in Western province, operated for decades by BHP of Australia, discharged mine tailings directly into the Octetti and Fly Rivers for years.

[00:17:31]The result was the destruction of fisheries across a thousand km river system, eliminating the primary protein source for hundreds of thousands of subsistance communities. It is documented by the UN environment program as one of the worst industrial environmental disasters in the Pacific.

[00:17:51]The compensation paid by BHP was a fraction of the ecological cost.

[00:17:58]Look at the gold in the ring on your finger right now or the gold inside your phone's circuit board.

[00:18:05]Some of it traveled through Porgura through communities that produced hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth for international shareholders and still have no reliable electricity, no secondary school with a full-time teaching staff and no hospital within a day's journey. The gold leaves Papa New Guinea every quarter. The consequences stay permanently.

[00:18:32]Chapter 5. Daily life. Step out of the mine country and into the city. Port Moresby's Koki Market at 6:00 in the morning. The harbor behind you is gray water catching the first sun. Around you, the market wakes in layers. Women unwrapping banana leaf parcels, the smell of wood smoke, fresh fish, and something sweet underneath. Beetlenut being sliced on wooden boards.

[00:18:57]vendors arranging sweet potato, taro, long beans, and coconut with the specific efficiency of people who have done this every morning for 30 years.

[00:19:08]This is how Papula New Guinea eats. The first thing you try is mumu, a traditional pit-cooked meal. Pork, sweet potato, taro, and banana steamed underground over hot stones wrapped in banana leaves for 2 to 3 hours. The pork falls apart. The sweet potato is dense and smoky and extraordinary.

[00:19:32]A full serve at the market costs you approximately $2 to3 US. A complete meal cooked with real skill and real time.

[00:19:41]That is what you pay for a small coffee in Sydney or Auckland. For 50 cents, you get a bowl of rice fish, white rice, fried reef fish pulled from the harbor this morning, chili, and lime eaten on a wooden bench at the water's edge while canoes move across the bay. The lime tree is in someone's yard a street behind you. The fish was alive 2 hours ago.

[00:20:06]And then there is Bulnut.

[00:20:09]Every corner in Port Moresby, every Highland market, every PMV bus stop, red stained mouths everywhere you look. A fresh nut with lime paste and mustard leaf costs 10 to 20. It is stimulant, social lubricant, and timekeeper all at once.

[00:20:29]The UN and WH flag chronic metal nut use is a significant contributor to oral cancer which Papawan Newu Guinea records among the highest rates of in the Pacific.

[00:20:41]The tension of daily life here in its most ordinary form. The things that connect people to each other also harm them slowly. Getting around Port Moresby means the PMV, public motor vehicle.

[00:20:55]battered mini buses running fixed routes with no fixed schedule. You flag one down, you squeeze into the back with 12 other people. You pay 50 cents to $1 for a cross-city journey. Traffic is dense, unpredictable, and loud.

[00:21:13]Road surfaces alternate between sealed asphalt and bare gravel within the same block. Outside the capital, distance becomes a different problem entirely. In the highlands, a journey of 100 km can take 6 hours on a good day. It can take 2 days. After a heavy rain, the track may not exist at all. For most Papua New Guineians, the PMV, the footpath, and the small charter plane are the only connections to anything beyond their immediate community.

[00:21:47]You could eat lunch at Koki Market for $3. The food would be genuinely extraordinary, fresh, complex, deeply tied to the land it came from. And you would share that market with women who walked 2 hours from their village to sell their produce and whose entire day's earnings will disappear before sundown.

[00:22:08]Would you eat at a market in Papua New Guinea? Yes and no. Drop it in the comments right now.

[00:22:16]Chapter 6. Beauty and Resilience. After all of this, the epidemic of violence, the burning of women accused of witchcraft, the gold mine that empties mountains while communities have no electricity. Is there anything beautiful left in Papa New Guinea? The answer will genuinely surprise you.

[00:22:37]Fly east out over the Solomon Sea down toward the coast of Milm Bay Province where the water shifts from gray to turquoise to a blue so deep it has no obvious name in English.

[00:22:52]Beneath the surface lies something that marine scientists describe with uncharacteristic emotional language.

[00:22:59]Papua New Guinea sits at the center of the coral triangle, the acknowledged capital of marine biodiversity on Earth.

[00:23:07]Over 2,000 species of reef fish, more than 600 coral species, a concentration of underwater life that no other ocean region on the planet can match.

[00:23:20]Chapter 7. An active tragedy.

[00:23:24]These are not separate facts. They are the same fact seen from different angles. The conscription that traps the body. The media ban that traps the mind.

[00:23:34]The school that conscripts children before they are adults. The mine that sent three men to a Canadian court to fight for their names. The 683,000 who chose a stateless life over the one they had. The 9,000 days. They are one system, one architecture.

[00:23:55]Tufi fjords in Oro province.

[00:23:59]Coral walls that drop hundreds of meters into clear water with horizontal visibility of 50 m in every direction.

[00:24:07]Patty ranks these among the top five dive destinations on Earth. The rest of the world has almost no idea they exist.

[00:24:17]Now travel inland into the western highlands to a site that UNESCO inscribed as a world heritage site in 2008.

[00:24:28]The Cook early agricultural site contains evidence of organized farming drainage channels, cultivation mounds, wooden implements dating back 9,000 years.

[00:24:40]9,000 years before Mesopotamia built its first irrigation canals, before Egypt's first dynasty, the people of Papwa New Guiney's highlands were managing fields and growing tarot in systematically designed agricultural systems when the rest of the known world was still hunting. That is not a footnote in human history.

[00:25:04]That is a founding chapter.

[00:25:07]Real life in Papa New Guinea is also the story of Dame Carol Kedu, Australianborn Papa New Guineian by choice and by marriage. She served as the only female member of Papa New Guiney's parliament for over a decade from 1997 to 2012 in a legislature that was in every session overwhelmingly male. She advocated for women escaping violence, for children without access to schools, for people with disabilities who had never seen a government program built with them in mind. Papua New Guinea awarded her the nation's highest honor, Dame Commander of the Order of the Star of Melanesia. She did not stand outside a broken institution and critique it.

[00:25:54]She stood inside it and pushed. The World Bank projects Papua New Guiney's economy to grow at 4.7% in 2025, above its historical average, driven by gold, copper, and a strong agricultural recovery. Cocoa exports are rising.

[00:26:15]Coffee is returning. A $50 billion pipeline of resource and infrastructure projects is in active development. The Porggera Peace Accords signed between previously waring tribal groups in January 2025 represent the possibility of stability in the Highlands, the region that holds the country's most significant mineral wealth. A country with this biodiversity, this agricultural heritage, and this resource base has the structural ingredients of transformation.

[00:26:47]Papua New Guinea was once called the last unknown. A place the world had not yet seen, measured, or mapped. It has become one of the Pacific's most complex and extraordinary stories. Not because its problems disappeared, but because its people refused to be defined by them.

[00:27:10]Chapter 7. Closing. These are not separate facts. They are the same fact seen from different angles. The violence against women, the sorcery killings, the mine that extracts billions while communities have no electricity. These are not isolated crises. They are expressions of the same condition. A country whose extraordinary people have been systematically failed by every institution designed to serve them.

[00:27:38]Every number in this documentary is verified. WH, World Bank, UNESCO, Human Rights Watch, UN Women. Every source is linked in the description below. Check them yourself. That is what watching a documentary responsibly looks like.

[00:27:58]Papua New Guinea has approximately 11 million people. They speak 800 languages, more cultural and linguistic diversity than the entire continent of Europe. They farm land their ancestors cultivated before the pyramids existed.

[00:28:15]And in 2026, two out of three women among them have experienced violence that the state cannot prevent, prosecute, or stop. They are not a crisis to be managed from a distance.

[00:28:28]They are a civilization ancient, layered, deeply complex, operating under conditions that would break most societies entirely. Papua New Guinea does not need your pity. It needs your understanding. Understanding that the gold in your phone traveled a supply chain through communities with no electricity.

[00:28:50]Understanding that a burning woman accused of witchcraft is what poverty, absent healthcare, and institutional abandonment produce, not a cultural anomaly. Understanding that Dame Carol Kedu was not an exception to Papa New Guinea. She was an expression of what Papa New Guinea is.

[00:29:11]What would you do genuinely if you had been born into Papa New Guinea? Leave your answer in the comments. I read everyone.

[00:29:22]If real life in Papa New Guinea has shifted something in how you see the world today, subscribe to Real Life Files. We are documenting every country on Earth. No filters, no political agenda, just the truth. As close as we can get to it. New video every 3 days.

[00:29:41]Next time on Real Life Files, we travel to the rugged heart of Central Asia, to Jigstan, a nation where breathtaking mountain peaks hide a chilling reality of absolute control.

[00:29:55]Here, a single president has held power for over three decades. crushing all political opposition and silencing the free press. It's a place where the state dictates your personal life from banning hijabs and long beards to regulating what you are allowed to name your children and even micromanaging how much you can spend on a wedding.

[00:30:18]Tajjikstan. Next.