History remembers the flames, the accusations, the screams, and the graves. Across Scotland and much of the world, campaigns have rightly fought to restore dignity to those murdered during the witch trials. Memorials have been raised. Names have been spoken aloud after centuries of silence. Justice, even delayed by hundreds of years, matters.
But somewhere along the way, another injustice has quietly taken root.
The men have been forgotten.
In Scotland alone, hundreds of men were accused, tortured, and executed during the witch hunts. Fathers, husbands, sons, healers, scholars, outcasts, and the vulnerable were dragged before courts driven by fear, superstition, and cruelty. Yet modern conversations often speak as though only women suffered.
They did not.
The witch trials were undeniably misogynistic in many ways. Women formed the majority of the accused in numerous regions, and the persecution of women deserves condemnation without hesitation. But truth does not become stronger when parts of it are erased. Equality is not achieved by replacing one silence with another.
When we speak only of “women killed as witches,” we unintentionally bury hundreds of male victims beneath the same ignorance that condemned them centuries ago.
The forgotten 400 — and countless more across Europe and beyond — deserve remembrance too.
Some people argue that focusing on men somehow detracts from women’s suffering. It does not. Remembering all victims does not weaken anyone’s story. Compassion is not a limited resource. Justice does not require exclusion. In fact, real justice demands completeness.
A memorial that omits victims because of their sex is not true remembrance. It is selective history. And selective history is dangerous.
The witch trials were built upon fear, hysteria, tribal thinking, and the dehumanisation of “the other.” People were stripped of individuality and reduced to labels. Guilty before trial. Disposable before truth. The innocent became politically convenient sacrifices. When modern society chooses to ignore certain victims because they do not fit a preferred narrative, it repeats the same moral failure in a different form. Not with gallows or fire, but with erasure.
To knowingly brush aside the suffering of innocent men is not progress. It is prejudice wearing the mask of virtue. No one is asking for women to be forgotten. No one is asking for history to be rewritten. The demand is far simpler:
Remember everyone.
Every innocent woman tortured to death deserves to have her name honoured.
Every innocent man tortured to death deserves exactly the same.
Because equality is not about elevating one group’s suffering while dismissing another’s. Equality means recognising humanity without conditions. It means refusing to allow politics, ideology, or social trends to decide whose pain matters. The victims of the witch trials were not symbols. They were people.
And every single one of them deserved better than to be forgotten.