Celtic Soul, you wrote:

"Perhaps the press phrased it as they did because she became interested from having watched the series, but had not actually done anything serious about it yet."

Perhaps that's true. But I suspect (but maybe that's more of a hope), with the apparent support her mother gave her in her religious searching, she would have gone deeper into the faith, given time. (In other words, she doesn't seem to have gotten into it simply as a way to shock her parents -- as many youngsters who visit AOL's Pagan chat rooms seem to do).

In any case, I have my doubts that the reporter looked that fully into the matter, based on the tone of the report (though s/he may have), and used the word "believed" simply because 'everyone knows witches aren't real, so this is clearly a sign of how unbalanced she really was -- she couldn't even handle being teased!' -- putting the onus on the one being teased rather than the ones doing the teasing

Now, this is a bit of thread drift, but:

Little Hawk, I agree with Peg: Wicca is not an ancient religion, even though some of its philosophy is drawn from what our interpretations of ancient myths. One of my pet peeves about the Neo-Pagan movement is so many insist that 'Neo' has nothing to do with it -- as if their lives depended on it. A religion's legitimacy should have nothing to do with its age. After all, Unitarianism didn't get a formal doctrine until 1819, and it didn't merge with Universalism until 1961. And yet very few have any qualms about whether the UU church is real.