Chaos Rampages Like Virus in South-East Asia

The horrors of the Chaos in South-East Asia continue to unfold with further reports of child sacrifice in Thailand and Laos.

The ritual murder of children is well-documented in ancient cultures such as the Aztecs of Mexico however the practice had all but died out worldwide until the last decade, when the poverty and suffering caused by the energy crisis have led to a revival of child sacrifice.

The first instances took place in Sub-Saharan Africa, however, the practice quickly gained popularity in South America and South-East Asia. 

Criminologist Kittikorn Paowsong is part of a taskforce investigating child sacrifice in South-East Asia. He says a majority of the victims are burnt to death, however at least a third are poisoned. There have also been reports of children being pushed from cliffs into the sea, and even beheaded. 

Anchali Kurusarttra, spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, described the figures as alarming. “In 2035 there were more than a hundred missing children reported in Thailand. Of these, our sources indicate, approximately 80% were the victims of ritual sacrifice.” Kurusarttra went on to say that the number of missing children is increasing every year. 

Doctor Suttipong Udomprecha, an anthropologist from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, divides the ritual killing of children in Thailand into three distinct phases.

“The practice was started by so-called ‘witch doctors’, who resorted to extreme measures after failing to fulfil their clients’ pleas to restore the level of prosperity they had enjoyed before the Chaos.”

In this first phase, Udomprecha says, most of the victims were children under five, who were abducted by witch doctors.

As the Chaos progressed, poor families became increasingly desperate and were often forced to sell their children to survive. Thus, in Phase 2, a market emerged in which children were trafficked from poor families to be sacrificed by the rich in an attempt to safeguard their wealth.

In the last year, Udomprecha describes the beginning of a third phase, in which people have begun to sacrifice their own children. “People are so frightened by the Chaos that they have displaced their civilisation. They kill their own children in the hope that it will stop them from losing anything more. Too late they realise that by murdering their own offspring they have already lost everything.”  

According to the Thai government, 73 children were reported missing in 2040. Anchali Kurusarttra says this statistic is misleading because it fails to account for children who have been sold for sacrifice or sacrificed by their own families. The true figure, she says, is probably at least three times as high.