Hey this can’t be mine….mine’s bigger.

Via BoingBoing this headline on Reuters:

Penis theft panic hits city..

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

These remarkable con artists, the penis thieves, though I would prefer the more substantial sounding cock snatchers or dick filchers, seem to be able to make the victim believe that something that is still there no longer is…kind of a reverse of the fairy tale…the emperors new member.

This curious news is one manifestation of what has been called penis panics where numbers of men will believe that their genitals have disappeared or are shrinking….in Asia this is know as koro. I like that word, reminiscent of sashimi, more than the medicalized Genital Retraction Syndrome.

At Kuro6hin, an article on Koro has the following:

Whilst penis theft would seem a fairly simple charge to refute, victims in an 1990 Nigerian outbreak (reported on by psychiatrist Sunny Ilechukwu) often believed that their penises were returned at the point of public accusation. Some even went as far as undress to prove their accusation to onlookers, subsequently claiming that their ‘returned’ penis had been replaced but was shrunk, leading them to think it must be a ghost penis or perhaps the wrong one.

which leads us to..

Transplanted penis removed after psychological issues

Doctors have previously succeeded in reuniting men with their sexual organs after traumatic accidents or attacks, but the Guangzhou operation is the first in which a donor penis has successfully been attached to another man, The Guardian reported.

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis after just two weeks.

“Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said.

An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Maybe it was a ghost?