1. Can the category 'culture' (or religion) be used?	​Yes. Voodoo rites are ritual activities related to voodoo, a religion with clear syncretic characteristics that incorporates elements of Catholicism and animism. The voodoo religion is considered the modern derivation of one of the world's oldest religions, traditional African animism.
2. Description of the cultural (or religious) practice and group.	The voodoo religion (or voodoo, meaning 'spirit' in the African languages Fon and Ewe) with its syncretic characteristics as we know it today, originated between the 17th and 18th centuries following colonialism in Africa, and in the Americas following the arrival of slaves from West Africa. It is a religion deriving from traditional African animism, widespread especially in present-day Benin and centred on the worship of nature divinities; today it is practised not only in Benin, but especially in Nigeria, Togo and Ghana by various social groups such as the Ewe, the Fon, the Mina or the Kabye, and has also spread to Central America (especially Haiti and Cuba) and South America following the trade of African slaves deported to this continent during the Spanish and Portuguese colonial period. Various rituals of the voodoo cult are currently performed in the practising communities; these include initiation (or baptism) rituals, funeral rituals, healing and curing rituals, consecration rituals, protection rituals and rituals of sacrifice and celebration to the loa (spirits), characterised by the trance of possession. The expression used to refer to the trance of possession, i.e. the communication between the loa (spirits) and the worshippers, is very graphic: the loa is said to 'ride' the possessed person like a horse. This is understandable if we consider that the purpose of the voodoo religion is communication between the divine world and the human world, and that every ceremony and celebration is structured around the goal of divine manifestation in the human world through the loa (spirits). During trance, in fact, a loa takes up residence in an individual's head after driving out the 'great good angel', one of the two souls they carry inside; this is the part of the soul on which intellectual and emotional life depend according to the voodoo religion. The sudden departure of this soul causes the characteristic shivers and jolts at the beginning of the trance, and once the 'good angel' has departed, the possessed person has the impression of total emptiness, as if losing consciousness. The head spins and the legs tremble: it is at this stage that the believer becomes not only the receptacle of the god, but also his instrument. It is the god's personality and not his own that is expressed in his behaviour and words; his expressions, gestures and even the tone of his voice reflect the character and temperament of the deity that has descended upon him. Some of these rituals are used, in certain contexts characterised by violent dynamics such as some areas of Nigeria (e.g. the state of Edo), to ensure control over women. In particular, we refer to the ritual oaths in which the bond is sealed between a self-styled benefactor, who charms young women with promises of work in Italy; the women are bound to repay the trip with a ritual oath, pledging to pay the acquired debt under the agreed conditions. If this pact is broken, the consequences, depending on beliefs, can be different: death, illness, madness, etc. The ritual oath thus becomes an intimidating and silencing means for young women who are trafficked. The ritual oath is taken in various ways, including, according to testimonies collected: young women who take the pact are made to drink a solution of alcohol and blood, have locks of hair cut off and small cuts made, with the use of razor blades, in various parts of the body, under the collarbones, on the hands, feet and behind the back. The experiential dimension of the ritual, the social pressure exerted by it and the belief in its undesirable consequences, leads to a psycho-physical state of constant alarm, often characterised by bodily sensations of discomfort, by dreams in which one suffers or risks suffering harm, to thoughts in which one conceives of harming oneself or others if one does not respect the bond. It is an experience based on the relationship between shared meanings, embedded in a social universe of values, gestures and cultural meanings learnt through social relations, and which therefore constitute vehicles of communication through which social life as a whole is managed.
​3. Embedding the individual practice in the broader cultural (or religious) system.	Voodoo religion is directed towards the worship of nature's deities, and can be understood if one frames it within animism. A religion is animist when it is believed that non-human entities are divine beings or spirits, or at least participate in and possess divine principles and potentialities. The animist, in fact, believes that there is no separation between the material and transcendent worlds, so that rocks, mountains, plants, animals, atmospheric phenomena and other material entities have souls, and represent deities and spirits of different categories. Because of its animist nature, there has been much debate as to whether voodoo can be considered a religion or simply a set of beliefs; it is believed that these prejudices have been created by the conflict with the Catholic religion, which has always sought to condemn voodoo practices. For many centuries, the voodoo religion was therefore presented as the embodiment of evil, or even a scapegoat that served to explain natural disasters, or perceived as synonymous with ritual murder, anthropophagy and witchcraft, thus an expression of superstition to be condemned. Consequently, the Catholic Church conducted several anti-superstition campaigns to eradicate the syncretism between voodoo and Catholicism, only to absorb and mix with it over the centuries, creating clear dynamics of syncretism and coming to manifest itself in a widespread manner in various voodoo cult contexts, especially in Latin America. Voodoo is characterised by many ritual activities that take place in the practising communities; these include initiation (or baptism) rituals, funeral rituals, healing and healing rituals, consecration rituals, protection rituals and rituals of sacrifice and celebration to the loa (spirits). These rituals play a very important role in the social context where they occur, to the point that they can be said to be a guide in the practitioner's life. It is important to remember, moreover, that many of the violent implications of voodoo rituals, such as the trafficking of prostitutes, are directly linked to the conditions of inequality prevailing in the context of the practice's development, i.e. to the fact that people have limited access to the resources necessary for their livelihood, and therefore seek through this instrument to develop strategies to raise the family's social status. Sending a young woman to Europe by stipulating an 'agreement' for the repayment of debt through a voodoo ritual is almost always a choice conditioned by the pressure of the young woman's family, which sees in this path a chance to improve its condition (it is rarely an individual choice); this creates a strong social pressure in the young woman, and turns voodoo rituals into clear ritual activities of subjugation. According to the National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip), an estimated 90% of young Nigerian women migrating to Europe have been subjected to this ritual.
4. Is the practice essential (to the survival of the group), compulsory or optional?	Voodoo rites are essential for communities of believers because they allow communication and interconnection with the spirits that dominate the forces of nature, i.e. the rocks, trees, waterways and animals, but also with individual people. Indeed, in some contexts, even the dead continue to live with and among the living, who can remain in contact with the dead and can ask them for favours. The way in which the voodoo practitioner perceives the world around him and with which he lives, therefore, leads him to a continuous activity of intercession with the spirits; a constant relationship between nature, the human being and the spirits through which the believer finds reasons to live and an explanation for death, in a permanent relationship between the living and the dead, between believers and spirits.
​5.     Is the practice shared by the group, or is it contested?	Voodoo is a shared and coherent system in the eyes of its practitioners, a worldview in which actions, speech, symbols and behaviour are of fundamental importance to the individual and the community to which he or she belongs, and rituals are one of the most important steps in this religious system. Sometimes, the social pressures exerted by rituals, especially when they are binding, lead individuals to move away from their context of origin, lest there be harmful consequences for them and their family.
​6.     How would the average person belonging to that culture (or religion) behave?	On the side of the voodoo rites of subjugation, the average person subjected to one of these voodoo rites believes in the capacity of this to bind and produce effects, to the point that 'voodoo death' has been theorised in doctrine, caused by the physical alterations produced by stress (Cannon 1942; Lester 2008-9). In some social contexts, the believers of this religion found themselves in the need to hide their practices or rituals because the official institutional leadership decided to impose the Catholic religion and to persecute and punish any sign of religious practices that were outside or against their dogmas of faith.
​7.     Is the subject sincere?	Among the various and very numerous rituals linked to the voodoo cult, those capable of bringing about forms of subjugation of individuals, representing themselves in the eyes of the victims as real sources of danger, arrive in courtrooms, so much so that they are used as the basis for applications for international protection. In such proceedings, the ascertainment of the subject's sincerity is guided by specific legal criteria and inevitably involves several levels: not only the credibility of the facts narrated by the applicant, but also the potential for injury. In relation to the above-mentioned cultural context, it should also be borne in mind that: some elements may not be known to the applicant (e.g. in cases where the applicant is destined to be a voodoo priest) due to the secrecy of certain rituals, which only become known at the time of holding the position; it is plausible that monotheistic religions (especially Islam and Christianity) and traditional beliefs exist simultaneously, often in conflict with each other but also strongly influencing each other. That said, for the purposes of a more rigorous configuration of the practice and the existence of symptomatic elements of its harmful scope, it might be useful to focus the investigation on certain elements:   the spatial location of the ritual, which as we have seen is more widespread in some geographical areas than in others; the function of the rite in the eyes of the applicant, the social role of the practice and the 'ministers' associated with it in the community of origin; other characteristics of the rite, if known to the applicant.
8.     The search for the cultural equivalent: the translation of the minority practice into a corresponding (Italian) majority practice. ​	As complex as it is to identify, a cultural equivalent of the voodoo ritual, especially its use as an instrument of power and control over the lives of individuals, can actually also be found in the majority culture. In the not too distant past, the life of Italian society was also strongly permeated by religious sentiment, mainly the Catholic one. It was (and sometimes still is) very common for religion to improperly derive practices that went beyond merely spiritual and moral functions, establishing instead social hierarchies, powers, and control over the lifestyles and behaviour of the members of society, under the threat of sin and eternal damnation, also determining forms of subjugation with important repercussions on the lives of individuals. It was, and sometimes still is, albeit to a lesser extent, a Christian morality that acted according to patterns similar to the rituals mentioned above, against anyone whose behaviour did not correspond to it, not only in order to defend it, in its value system, but to maintain control over individuals: the community's aversion towards women who carried unmarried pregnancies; towards divorcees, who were excluded from the sacrament of communion, for example; towards those who chose not to baptise their children; going even further back in time to the compulsory consecration in ecclesiastical orders of sons and daughters in order to acquire a higher social status; the problems that could occur in choosing to profess a different religion. Situations that are different but have one thing in common: the weight of a religious morality or belief on daily life, on the perception of the individual, on relations with the community to which he or she belongs, and the choice, often made even in our society, to flee to other places where it is possible to exercise one's life in freedom. In addition to this type of pressure from the Catholic majority religion, there are also individuals in the majority culture who believe that certain rituals, spells, magic can condition reality and produce cures or illnesses in the body. Often branded as superstitious by mainstream rationalist positions, these beliefs are still widespread across various social classes and also see figures of magicians and other practitioners practising such rites.
9.      Does the practice cause harm? ​	The voodoo cult as a whole would not appear to cause any harm except in those cases in which it lends itself to securing forms of subjugation over other individuals and as a form of manifestation of power. In this case, it is capable of profoundly influencing the quality of life. It is a greater 'damaging attitude' than that applicable to mere superstition precisely because it has its foundations in a structured, solid religious system, widespread among large sections of the population and permeating multiple aspects of earthly and otherworldly life. It is obvious that such harm can only emerge when assessed in relation to a 'culturally oriented' agent and influenced not only by his own perception but also by that of the community to which he belongs, part of a culture in which the supernatural has a founding role with respect to everyday life because it merges with spirituality, religiosity and the management of relations between private individuals, especially in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa. That is why the harm will not emerge if related to an agent outside these types of institutions. From this point of view, such practices are capable in the abstract of generating two types of harm: the psychic damage, resulting from the strong conviction of the power of the ritual (state of strong awe, vulnerability, fear for one's own or one's loved ones' safety, conviction about the correlation between the death of loved ones and possible rites);  the physical harm, both as an effect of the strong psychic pressures experienced and, albeit indirectly, in the possible/possible acts of violence exercised by the communities to which they belong in the event of refusal of the ritual. Some scholars have studied the phenomenon of 'voodoo deaths', referring to those cases in which the belief in the power of such rituals was such that it psychosomatically conditioned individuals and caused their death. Today, it is science itself that admits the link between certain psychic situations of the individual, linked to private events or to the socio-cultural context of origin, and certain purely physical pathologies or symptoms. In criminal law, for instance, in relation to the case of Nigerian trafficked women, who are forced to pay enormous amounts of money and prostitute themselves to the 'madams' in order not to break the oaths of allegiance taken in their homeland through such rituals, the damage is widely acknowledged: the ritual leads the individual to place himself in a state of vulnerability and psychological subjection, typical of the phenomena of slavery. The devastating impact of such oaths has in fact had international prominence and led King Ewuare II, the traditional supreme figure of Benin City (Edo State, south-eastern Nigeria), also known as 'Oba' to issue, in March 2018, a specific edict to dissolve all voodoo rites performed for the purpose of perpetrating trafficking, granting forgiveness for past rites to the ministers who had performed them but condemning future ones. Such an absorbing context of beliefs cannot condition only one section of the population (women, victims of trafficking); it has deep roots in a cultural and institutional system, pervades educational models and is therefore likely to recreate in the abstract the same feelings of subjection and limitation of self-determination in other individuals who have lived in such a context even if they are male and not victims of trafficking.
​10.  What impact does the minority practice have on the culture, constitutional values, and rights of the (Italian) majority?	In the majority culture, voodoo rites have an imaginary and fanciful connotation, sometimes assimilated to the concept of macumba or often associated with the image of 'dolls' or various puppets that, pierced by pins by a persecutor, are supposed to generate excruciating pain in the victim at the parts of the body being inflicted. It is not at all common for them to be associated with more complex and structured forms of ancestral spirituality that can also express themselves in beneficial forms. The term voodoo always has a negative connotation, but whose irrationality and harmlessness seems obvious. The fear associated with this type of ritual is considered to be either the result of naive credulity, stemming from minimal social, economic and cultural conditions, or a form of invention used by the alleged victim for opportunistic purposes only. When its detrimental impact on the individual's existence is recognised, as for instance in the case of trafficking victims, the ritual appears as a traditional constraint that subjugates the individual, devoid of any beneficial nature, and thus in conflict with the individual's freedom and dignity, especially when the individual feels compelled by it to perform acts against his or her will and detrimental to dignity. On the one hand, voodoo practices must be traced back to a much broader spiritual and religious system, from whence they do not necessarily take on a negative connotation and therefore could fall under the protection of the religiosity, spirituality of the individual, as with other beliefs. However, when they lead to the escape of the same from the communities to which they belong or become instruments to limit self-determination and reinforce mechanisms of slavery, they are capable of harming fundamental goods of the individual such as life, physical and psychic safety. From the criminal point of view, in the case of trafficking victims, they could reinforce the bond of slavery (Art. 600 of the criminal code. Reduction or maintenance in slavery; Art. 601 of the Penal Code _ Trafficking in human beings) and accentuate the victim's state of vulnerability. In the context of international protection, it is rare for such rituals to be recognised as harmful enough to justify the granting of protection measures. They are not considered to harm the individual's freedom or physical integrity except in cases where they are associated with human trafficking. In this case, they are deemed to violate fundamental rights and justify the recognition of a general right of asylum for foreigners who flee from them.
​11.   Does the practice perpetuate patriarchy?	The damaging effectiveness of rituals in cases of enslavement and trafficking determines a limitation of freedom for gender reasons, a greater vulnerability for women than for men. The problem takes on even broader dimensions in the area of patriarchy when, as repeatedly highlighted in the reports of some international organisations and by some governments in sub-Saharan Africa, local state forces fail to guarantee trafficking victims adequate protection once they return home. Even once the ritual bond is fulfilled and the debt paid, former prostitutes are not accepted by their communities. This is also why, albeit indirectly, the ritual has a discriminatory power against the female gender. The Italian State more readily recognises the harmfulness of voodoo rites against trafficking victims, for criminal and international protection purposes, but is much more reluctant to recognise and investigate their actual harmful potential against male applicants, who flee for fear of rites perpetrated against them because of intra-family disputes or because they do not want to belong to the cultural group that professes them or become voodoo priests.
12.  What good reasons does the minority present for continuing the practice? The criterion of an equally valid life choice.	In contexts where individuals seek protection from specific cultural practices that they do not share or that cause harm, the good reasons for carrying out the practice by those in the community who do share it should be highlighted in order to better understand its diffusion in places of origin, its pervasiveness and thus the inevitable risk to which those who shun it are subjected (see the entries Witch-hunting and Witchcraft; Female Genital Mutilation in this Guidebook). In this case, it has been amply highlighted above how voodoo rites, even those of subjection, are part of a structured, existential context with complex connotations because they are religious in nature. It is therefore probable that as long as the cult as a whole remains, as the religious expression of certain populations, the collateral aspects will also remain, including the problems of exclusion in the case of the choice of other cults, the use of rites in the function of subjection and the exercise of power. An awareness of these critical issues on the part of the practising communities themselves can bring about a change and a progressive restriction of them. Undoubtedly, the role of states is also important in this process, their ability to watch over and discourage such practices, or to promote a different and more personalistic awareness of the individual, but certainly this influence will affect to a far lesser extent than the changes that may come from the contestation of the practice by members within the community itself or even by traditional leaders, as happened in the case of the Oba decree in Nigeria in 2018.