'Summer Holidays are for Fun not Pain' declared the (London) Metropolitan Police Force as school broke up for the Summer 2012 break... A strange but necessary message because, horrifically, thousands, of young British girls are forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) whilst school is out; and some will have died.
And still FGM continues.
In my original Huffington Post UK blog on FGM I asked why it continues in Britain without to date any successful legal action. We ask that question again here, in an attempt to understand the wider policy and sociological frameworks of efforts to abolish FGM.
Misconceptions
There are serious issues about UK FGM policy.
Guidelines on FGM for professional workers are not an adequate response.
There is no longer a national co-ordinator for tackling FGM.
Small grant-aid funding, spread between competing small organisations will not impact on this massive issue.
The UK 'softly, softly' approach to FGM is not the only way. Many other countries take a much more robust view of this crime.
But let us move beyond what (doesn't) work, to the specific contexts of female genital mutilation.
The MGM-FGM debate
An element of competition often colours debate about the parallels between male and female 'circumcision' (aka 'genital mutilation'). The greatest fury about male, usually infant, circumcision (also named male genital mutilation, or MGM) comes from the USA, where the majority of newborn boys undergo it, but there is also a growing consciousness in Britain and mainland Europe - hence e.g. the heated debate about Jewish and Muslim entitlements to this long-established custom.
The epidemiologies and risks to life of MGM and FGM are nonetheless factually different; but validated and mutually acknowledged details of these relative risks are difficult to obtain and more accurate epidemiological analyses alone would not secure completely common ground.
Commonality on MGM and FGM may be possible on human rights issues - e.g. the principle that invasive action to change a person's body should, unless medically necessary, occur only with that person's mature and informed consent - but the claims and counter-claims of MGM-FGM will probably continue.
[Those who wish to pursue this debate can do so in a separate, dedicated post here.]
But still a girl suffers potentially lethal genital mutilation somewhere in the world every 18 seconds - around 8,000 children every day. Still, averaged out, more than two girls and babies are at risk of FGM every hour, every day in the UK [c.f. A Statistical Study to Estimate the Prevalence of FGM in England and Wales ].
Health, wealth and welfare
Preventing FGM therefore relieves demands on scarce public resources. It also helps curtail demographic pressure as the world population continues inexorably to grow.
Uncircumcised girls in the relevant communities continue longer in school (they are healthier, and not seen as ready only for marriage); and they start their own families later. Plus, their babies are also at less risk of death or illness: The WHO estimates an additional 10-20 babies die per 1000 deliveries as a result of FGM.
There are multiple reasons FGM must stop, even beyond the immediate ones.
Complexities of context
FGM is at core not 'religious', but, rather, 'cultural', about (group) identity. Thus, some ex-pats resettling in European cities may be more attached to FGM than people in the 'homeland'.
In the sociological sense it is a 'tribal' marker or identifier, rather than a cultural norm.
And alarmingly, the age for FGM is dropping. Parents may think 'early' FGM less traumatic for the child; plus, pre-schoolers are less visible, so the procedure is unlikely to be detected by outsiders.
Further, some communities have extraordinary beliefs about how the human body functions, whilst FGM perpetrators make their living from it, so they sustain these folklore rationales.
It takes a fiercely brave and independent woman - like Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Waris Dirie or Soraya Mire - to challenge FGM.
Oppression of women
At its most fundamental, FGM is a powerful physical and psychological vehicle for the subjugation of women. It is overtly intended to ensure women do not engage in pre- or extra-marital sex; and has the express objective of making girls more 'marriageable'.
Marriage in traditional societies is an economic rather than a personal, emotional contract. Women are required to depend upon their husbands for day-to-day living; hence the persistence also of other gravely female-oppressive practices such as child and forced marriage, and family 'honour' violence. Little wonder, unless men support abandoning FGM - and increasingly some do - mothers actually want their daughters to undergo it.
Refusing FGM can result in adult destitution. In many traditional societies women are traded as chattels from fathers to husbands; and they cannot return to sender.
In denial
The facts of FGM are horrendous. How can anyone tackle these deeply embedded beliefs and practices about such an intimate issue? Neither modern science nor the western legal system seem adequate to challenge the contexts in which FGM continues to thrive.
And so many UK professionals continue in denial: Surely the figures (24,000 British children annually) are wrong? Isn't FGM dying out anyway? In any case, nothing can be done because no-one comes forward so it obviously not in our patch. Which is just as well, because quite how difficult would it be to talk about such things?
The excuses and avoidance tactics perfunctorily adopted by some child safe-keeping practitioners are many and various; but 'nothing to do with us', 'too complicated' and 'so embarrassing' must rate amongst the top let-outs.
FGM can be a crime equivalent to the lethal abuse of Baby Peter... a tragedy resulting in national media coverage and enquiries, as well as sanctioned social workers.
Yet still there is no formal, public action which ensures that child safe-keeping addresses FGM adequately.
It is the growing realisation everywhere that FGM must stop which will actually make that happen. There must be no more summer holidays which tragically for some are about pain, not fun.
You can support the demand to STOP Female Genital Mutilation (FGM / 'cutting') in Britainby signing this HM Government e-petition.
A more detailed, fully referenced version of this post can be read here. (See also Facebook: NoFGM (UK), Twitter: #NoFGM and @NoFGM1.)
Hilary Burrage wrote the 'Health Education' chapter in Dufour (ed, CUP): The New Social Curriculum, has researched young people's health, and was formerly a Senior Lecturer in Health and Social Care.
Follow Hilary Burrage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HilaryBurrage
but i dont want to be stuck in the airport behind 50 kids all to be examined and what if they originated in the uk, where do you deport them to???
Most of those that get involved, never have truly settled in the UK, so they should be sent to where their parents and grandparents etc obviously feel more attached to.
Why do you think you would be in a queue behind 50 or for that matter, 50 thousand?
Any child arriving from out of the country, that belong to ethnic parents would be easy enough to separate and isolate.
So You would not be inconvenienced.
Perhaps you prefer that little girl writhing and squirming in front of you at the passport control, gets through unexamined, to become a burden on the NHS as the FGM procedure turns to septicaemia, leaving her maimed for life.
I prefer to forestall such an eventuality, by making sure if she leaves the UK she returns if at all, in the same condition, unblemished (hopefully), as she left here.
And if that means the selfish like you get inconvenienced,...Tough!
Ayan Hirsi Ali is my favorite heroin.
Only exemplary punishment is going to bring this practice to an end.
Genital mutilation should be pretty easy to prosecute. The loss of a clitoris or foreskin doesn't happen by accident or by a child's own actions, unlike, for example, bruising! Presumably, at some point, a doctor should check a child's genitals.
Unfortunately, there are still many people who try to excuse, to justify or to ignore male genital mutilation (regrettably, this article, presumably intentionally, declines to condemn this practice), while female genital mutilation is almost universally, and entirely rightly, agreed in the West to be a barbaric violation of rights.
Surely the only reason that FGM is so common and goes unpunished is the same reason that MGM is so common and goes unpunished: extreme cultural/moral relativism, or political correctness, or whatever you want to call it. Until most of us accept that the child's freedom from medically unnecessary surgery trumps the parents' freedom of religion, in other words that a son of a Jewish couple or the child of a Muslim couple has the same rights as the child of a Christian or atheist or Hindu couple, this problem is not going to be solved. That means acknowledging the immorality of both MGM and FGM. Presumably, you would still be against FGM, if the mortality rate were negligible. The health implications are an interesting and persuasive, though secondary, issue. Genital mutilation is wrong, because it is a violation of rights: that is the central issue.
I absolutely did NOT 'decline to condemn' MGM; I simply invited those who wish to discuss male circumcision to do so in the open, public location I explicitly constructed for that purpose.
See: The Other FGM Debate: Is Male Circumcision Also Child Abuse? [ http://hilaryburrage.com/2012/06/03/the-other-fgm-debate-is-male-circumcision-also-child-abuse/ ].
Past experience demonstrates that sadly some people are more keen to co-opt articles on FGM for discussion of MGM, than to examine gravely how it is that thousands of small female children are still subjected to prolonged, excruciating, nightmarish horror which everyone should be doing everything possible to stop, now.
The very significant mortality rate from FGM on young girls - and later on, their own babies also - is by no conceivable measure a 'secondary' issue. It's irreparable damage, abuse and suffering, on an epidemic scale.
That said, I personally agree that MGM is a very serious candidate for legal prohibition unless medically warranted.
Please read what I said: that MGM is fundamentally a matter of 'the principle that invasive action to change a person's body should, unless medically necessary, occur only with that person's mature and informed consent '.
This article is an attempt to analyse, trying to reach beyond the normal rhetorics, why something as horrific as FGM somehow still continues.
Can we please now return to the topic under discussion here, which is how to STOP FGM? Thank you.
I am just as concerned about the medical procedures of both, but there is a vast difference in the outcome.
The full comparison would be if the male glans was excised. Patently that is not the case, and a male almost invariably can overcome the loss of the foreskin, but would he be able to 'perform' his sexual functions without the head of his penis?
There lies the difference, the female has her sexual sensitivity utterly destroyed, and usually with further unnecessary mutilation procedures. against the simple procedure of removing the male foreskin, be that desirable or not.
I feel there is a case to be made to say a equivalence is being propounded that in all truth fails to meet any level of equality.
But, religious folk will no doubt have a great say in the future of male circumcision, but witchcraft will ensure the destruction of the female organs carries on, regardless of what laws are made in our civilisation.
Religion, superstition, witchcraft, all much of a muchness really.
It's just the degree to which the matter has been accepted in society that decides what is likely to persist.
The two stuggles can not be kept independent when cultures that cut both sexes (and there is no culture that cuts girls that does not also cut boys) point the finger at US-style MGC to justify their practices.
But to justify this message on this thread, here is a link to a list of motivations for FGC: http://www.circumstitions.com/FGC-stitions.html
It is not done ONLY to attack women's sexuality, and even then, it is framed with the best of intentions (albeit conceiving women's sexuality as dangerous [to men] or otherwise in need of control).
How to STOP [F]GC ? Education, but it depends where you are talking about. Within cultures where it is intrinsic, the work needs to be done with the utmost cultural sensitivity. In a country like the UK, a more brutal "When in Rome - just get over it" approach may be more appropriate.