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Female Genital Mutilation Bans Should Be Better Implemented: UN

  • Anti-FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere pictured during an interview in London, March 29, 2016.

    Anti-FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere pictured during an interview in London, March 29, 2016. | Photo: Reuters

Published 5 February 2018
Opinion

Campaigns calling for the end of the practice will only be successful if they seek the support of women who are most affected by the practice.

The United Nations called on world leaders Monday to properly implement the laws prohibiting female circumcisions, one day before the world day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

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The practice is still ruining the lives of millions of women, recalled UN Envoy on Youth Jayathma Wickramanayake during the International Youth Forum of Female Genital Mutilation taking place in Gambia.

Female circumcisions are a long-standing practice in several parts of the world, namely the Middle East and Africa. Middle Eastern and African feminists have been discussing and debating the role, effects, and cultural life of female circumcision on the African continent for decades. The label, female circumcisions, also known as female cuttings, describes a wide variety of practices, from a prick of the genitalia to the removal of the entire outer genitalia, from a coercive practice enacted on infants and toddlers to a procedure chosen by adult women after the birth of their first child. It can be practiced for religious, personal, cultural, and coming of age purposes. Some women consider themselves victims of the practices, and others see themselves as supporters of it.

The World Health Organization describes female circumcisions as comprising “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or another injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”

Campaigns calling for the end of coerced female circumcision are necessary but have failed to properly include African and Middle Eastern feminist sectors, who have been working for decades within the complexity of their own communities.

In many instances, female circumcisions are a human rights violation, because it happens to minors who lack the capacity to give consent for the procedure that is enacted upon them. For other women, circumcision is a choice they make about their own bodies within the communities and societies in which they live. Many African feminists have compared women's choice to undergo this circumcision, as similar to the prevalence of plastic surgery in the West.

Female circumcisions are usually almost exclusively associated with the religion of Islam in the Western imaginary. But even if it is prevalent in some Muslim majority countries, especially on the African continent, it is also popular in Kurdish communities in Iraq. In Niger, only 2 percent of Muslim women have experienced genital cutting, while 55 percent of Christian women in the country have undergone the procedure.

Circumcisions, male and female, consist of major surgery involving risks, especially when that surgery is done in less than sterile environments. There can also be a psychological trauma for girls who were forced to undergo the circumcision against their own will.

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