A separate 2010 Unicef report notes it is typically vulnerable children with physical disabilities, or illnesses such as epilepsy, who are targeted.

Others are branded for appearing withdrawn, lazy, or unruly.

Nigeria’s criminal code prohibits accusing, or even threatening to accuse, someone of being a witch. And the Child Rights Act of 2003 makes it an offence to subject any child to physical or emotional torture, or submit them to any inhuman or degrading treatment.

However, while this piece of legislation was enacted at the national level, the country’s 36 states are still required to formally ratify it. This not only gives individual states exclusive responsibility - it allows them to make laws relevant to their specific situations.

Only about three-quarters of Nigeria’s states have domesticated the Child Rights Act, and to date only the state of Akwa Ibom has included specific provisions concerning the abuse of alleged child witches. Its 2008 law made witch branding punishable by a custodial sentence of up to 10 years.

And despite lobbying attempts, Cross River State has yet to amend its own 2009 version of the legislation to specifically outlaw the offence.

But regardless of the fragmented attempt to criminalise it, witch-branding continues under the noses of the state governments and police of Akwa Ibom and Cross River states.

Oliver Orok, minister of sustainable development and social welfare for the Cross River State government, told the BBC the ministry was “working assiduously to eliminate these practices”.

“The state government in partnership with Unicef and other development partners organised a summit to deliberate on amending the law to include, among other things, the issue of branding children as witches and its consequences,” says Mr Orok.

The minister says "criminal law has abolished such practices". However, 10 years on, no-one has been successfully prosecuted in the courts.

There has been an increase in advocacy across the state to deal with the issue, Mr Orok says, and that money had been made available to build a home for children at risk.

He adds that if the government was made aware of cases, it “would move against such churches and their prophets”.

Lawyer James Ibor argues that the police are poorly funded, and not equipped to carry out these types of investigations.

“Often we have to push for investigations,” he says.

Ibor runs a local organisation in Calabar called Basic Rights Counsel Initiative (BCRI), which specialises in legal cases concerning child rights abuse - it also runs the emergency shelter where Comfort and her siblings are staying.

He tells me about two children who were poisoned by their father, who believed they were witches.

He pleaded guilty, but there were no resources to send blood samples to Lagos to confirm the children’s cause of death.

One year on, their bodies remain in the morgue, and the father has yet to be tried.

Ibor claims that cases have stalled for years.

He says his job is made harder by the reluctance of the police and government to investigate controversial issues combined with a lack of willingness from families and communities to provide evidence.

About a quarter of his ongoing cases relate to witchcraft, he says.

But this phenomenon is not just restricted to Nigeria's more remote regions.

Just six months ago, the Nigerian media reported on 40 children who were rescued from a witchdoctor’s “torture camp” in the capital of Abuja.

And this May in Lagos, a boy was badly beaten by his mother with a koboko, or horsewhip.

“So we have the laws,” says Ibor. “The problem is not the laws - the problem is implementing these laws and until then our children are not safe.”

And he blames some of the “prophets” and “pastors” for sowing fear across the Niger Delta region where poverty and a belief in witchcraft are widespread.