Free FGM…
January 22, 2008 by sparklematrix
Seriously, this article via the f word just bust my Scream o Meter. The New York times reports on a Indonesian centre that offers free female genital mutilation - woo get your genitals mutilated for free no less.
When a girl is taken — usually by her mother — to a free circumcision event held each spring in Bandung, Indonesia, she is handed over to a small group of women who, swiftly and yet with apparent affection, cut off a small piece of her genitals. Sponsored by the Assalaam Foundation, an Islamic educational and social-services organization, circumcisions take place in a prayer center or an emptied-out elementary-school classroom where desks are pushed together and covered with sheets and a pillow to serve as makeshift beds. The procedure takes several minutes. There is little blood involved. Afterward, the girl’s genital area is swabbed with the antiseptic Betadine. She is then helped back into her underwear and returned to a waiting area, where she’s given a small, celebratory gift — some fruit or a donated piece of clothing — and offered a cup of milk for refreshment. She has now joined a quiet majority in Indonesia, where, according to a 2003 study by the Population Council, an international research group, 96 percent of families surveyed reported that their daughters had undergone some form of circumcision by the time they reached 14.
It’s also worth pointing out NYT that this is a practice also performed by Christian and non religious groups not only Muslims.
According to Lukman Hakim, the foundation’s chairman of social services, there are three “benefits” to circumcising girls.
“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”
Oh my fucking god at least he’s a honest total misogynist. Females don’t need ’stabilising’ or ’balancing’ or to slice up their ugly genitals in fear of offending their male owners. Honestly, I don’t give a rat’s arse how cultural or traditional or long-established, time-honoured blah blah this hideous practice is. It’s mutilation of young girls genitals leading sometimes to death, persistent infection, chronic pain, difficulties in child birth, loss of sexual pleasure all in the name of hate. Yes, Hate of anything that is remotely female and you can’t get anything more female than female genitals.
In addition, persuading people that rejecting harmful cultural traditions doesn’t mean having to reject cherished positive cultural traditions. If it’s ‘cultural’ to mutilate females then there is something seriously messed up with that ‘culture’ it cannot be cherished or positive. It’s weird how when stuff happens to men it’s deemed as ‘political’ however when stuff happens to females it’s classed as ‘cultural’ think along the lines of foot binding, breast ironing and FGM here.
Please don’t anyone even try to bring up male circumcision for there is absolutely no comparison. Men still have normal sexual function but depending on the extent of the FGM (and the Times points out that 80 per cent involve total removal of the clitoris and labia) most women do not function sexually - ever - never mind about ‘normal‘. Yeah, just a bit more radical than removal of the male prepuce. And for what it’s worth I also do not agree with male circumcision which in effect is done to make the male more like god….eye roll.
Moreover, don’t anyone even dare remark on how it’s sometimes actually the women performing / assisting in the operation. Of course it is, they want what they see as the best for their daughters while trying to survive in a male dominated culture. Where marriage is viewed as the only way to subsist when you are female. Where their daughters will be shunned and ostracised and un-marriageable unless they conform to a male dictated practice. Or as Mary Daly points out, a patriarchy will always find the “token torturers” to do their dirty work, keeping the blood off their hands and as I’ve pointed out above, think foot binding et al. This is what unites the brotherhood, regardless of class, colour or creed it’s what they all agree on. The dominance and control over females but lets be a tad sneaky here and recruit us some proxy .
Culture? Stuff culture, for once you take away this control the hierarchies fall like the proverbial house of cards. And don’t they know it.
Yes, yes, yes. Cutting women or girls in the name of culture or religion or “beauty” or control is just wrong, and especially so when the cutting creates significant health risks and interferes with sexual function (as all but the most minor types of cutting do). There is no excuse and no comparison with male circumcision. I am as angry and hurt as you about FGM, I feel like a helpless sister to those hurt and frightened children, and the women who are walking wounded. I am outraged by FGM and its prevalence and its severity and by the people who try to defend it as in some way acceptable.
But.
While I am extremely reluctant to spring to the defence of or act as an apologist for free FGM centres, I do think there may be at least some good, some progress that might come out of these kinds of projects. In practice, change is going to be slow. We can’t just make it stop overnight. Been tried, didn’t work. The more I find out about it, the more reports I read on stopping FGM, the more I have to accept that it is a slow process.
It is about changing the culture which views FGM as a good thing, it is about changing attitudes of parents and their daughters that FGM is a necessary, positive thing for them. It is about finding alternative ways of satisfying the needs that FGM currently satisfies. Depending on the specific cultural context, that might involve finding alternative rites of passage, or having men step up and say they are happy to marry uncircumcised women, or having uncircumcised women step up and say that they have lived great healthy moral lives without undergoing FGM, or having religious leaders confirm that FGM is not a religious duty and/or that it is against religion because of the harm it does… or whatever that particular community needs to learn in order to turn away from FGM. Sometimes, its about encouraging parents to medicalise the cutting, both for safety and so that proper health information can be made available to them and potentially influence their choices.
That this is a long process is heartbreaking and gutwrenching but nobody has yet come up with a quicker fix.
And in the meantime projects like this might help women and girls who are to undergo FGM have less dangerous cutting, less invasive cutting, lower risk of infections or other complications. It might even be or become the focus for reducing the severity of the cutting to (as already happens in some places) a symbolic prick with little or no risk of serious or long term harm.
Don’t get me wrong. The cutting must stop. But while we are going about that work, maybe there is a grain of positive in a project like this. It may be masterminded by ignorant womanfearing people (like Lukman Hakim who you quoted ugh) but it may also help to reduce the suffering that many women are enduring right now. No cutting would be best. In the meantime - free, controlled, clean cutting is less bad than cheap, unregulated, dirty cutting.
Ack. I feel a bit dirty now. Lesser-of-two-evils is such a horrible justification for not castrating male FGM supporters. Maybe if they knew that FGM is akin to male castration rather than male circumcision they would change their attitudes pdq. Sadly, I doubt it. Because as the quote from Lukman Hakim clearly shows - female castration is what it’s all about.
Maia, I agree with you. It reminds me in a way of the ‘safe, clean and regulated’ abortions argument where to make abortion illegal would purely hand it back to the back street abortionists. At this stage, where as you point out the cessation of cutting is a long way off then yes indeed any harm reduction is gratefully received. I just struggle to make any sense of brutally torturing little girls for the reasons given by Lukman Hakim.
I know that Mary Daly has said that she thinks it needs to come from men including religious leaders, that they need to step up and say they are happy to marry uncircumcised women.
If you look at the slide show on the site, there is a close up of a little girl screaming with her face contorted in agony. No anaesthetic - what the fuck is that about?
Yifat Susskind who is communications director of MADRE recently wrote an article wherein she takes apart claims it is ‘culture’ which operates to excuse and tolerate male violence against women. FGM is perpetrated on girls because men want it and of course the dirty work is carried out by women. It is yet another aspect of men’s control of women’s sexualities. As Yifat Susskind says in her article rather than viewing ‘culture’ it is gender ‘a system of power relations whose number one enforcement mechanism is recourse to violence against women. ……..use culture and religion to rationalise women’s subjugation.
Here is the link to Yifat’s article which makes the connection between different cultures but whose aims are the same - subjection of women and enforcement of male domination and control.
http://www.madre.org/articles/me/womenbasra010908.html
Western culture too enforces female subjugation to men but it goes under the name of pseudo ‘female sexual empowerment’ wherein women are exhorted to become sexual commodities for men and supposedly become empowered themselves.
I know one African country at least wherein there has been some success in preventing girls from being forcibly sexually mutilated and instead of cutting the girl, a ceremony is performed wherein the onlookers acknowledge the girl is recognised as being a woman but she is not mutilated in any way.
Yes I saw that. And the fear on their faces.
I guess it wouldn’t be a rite of passage if they didn’t suffer.
I’ve also heard the screams of young girls undergoing “traditional” FGM ceremonies in dark, dirty huts.
There’s no nice here. Only bad, and worse.
Tears.
Apologies I forgot to give due credit to Global Sisterhood Network for publicising this important article.
That’s an excellent article Jennifer thanks. That’s why I mentioned (only briefly) how the NYT concentrated on the Islamic side of things. Who are they trying to fool?
From the madre article.
Tears indeed Maia, I have a splitting headache - literally - after reading all of this.
well it’s free - so is rape - except these girls get a piece of fruit afterwards. bizarrely that’s the bit that strikes me as so awful and disconnected. ‘have an apple’ ???
i think it may well be ‘culture’ - culture is not an excuse. some bits of a culture are good, some are bad. nobody should be allowed to shelter behind that construct. culture changes - culture is what we do, how we treat others, how we interact with our world, how we share it. how we oppress and torture. some bits we need to lose. we need to make the choice.
and the choice begins at home.
like you needed telling that - sorry.
easier and saves you time being told what you already know if i say i agree (and maia’s pragmatic comment 1 made me realise that it isn’t as black and white as i made it above - and you certainly don’t come across as a fgm apologist)
The problem with free, clean cutting though is if it is endorsed, it endorses the practice and makes it more acceptable and respectable. This isn’t like saying sex workers should use condoms, or drug users should get clean needles, because there is no reason for it to happen in the first place and as much as sex workers or drug users may be at the mercy of their own background they are still (mostly) adults exercising a degree of (highly compromised) choice.
I really don’t think the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument holds sway here - it is like saying if you are going to rape children use a condom so they won’t get Aids. There isn’t an easy answer here but I feel very uneasy that we should be condoning - and thus prolonging something to any degree because it is slightly less harmful than the alternative which is proving harder than we thought to get rid of. FGM happens, secretly, in the UK as well, but I wouldn’t be very happy if the NHS started offering it to make sure it was done safely (they’re already offering hymen repairs for god’s sake).
And I have to say that annoying though it is to live in a society where the Daily Mail constantly runs articles on women who have been ‘empowered’ by having breast implants, thankfully they aren’t compulsory yet. This is mutilation on a grand scale, but it definitely isn’t unique to Islam - all religions (including the highly trendy Buddhism) preach some degree of hatred of the female body. Usually the religion is used as a justification - as opposed to being a motivation for people who otherwise would never have thought of hating women.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot today and even though the nurse ratchet side of me is bizarrely grateful to the improved clinical conditions of the clinic as opposed to dirty knives and shards of glass used as surgical instruments , this is only in respect to the actual individual girls undergoing the cutting.
As soon as a practice is medicalised (and that seems to be what they are attempting to do) it swiftly becomes accepted and normalised. Cutting is already an approved and routine procedure, so is the clinic merely dragging an outdated and barbaric abuse into the 21st century glossed up as a ‘clinical’ intervention.
Is it merely deceptive and superficial and not changing anything except *less agony* inflicted by using scalpels instead of rusty knives.
Isn’t this what we do as females continuously - just accept *less* abuse and be grateful for it?
Yes - it’s what we do all the time, accepting harm reduction because we know we can’t avoid harm altogether. It’s not necessarily a question of being grateful for it. It’s more about accepting that there isn’t much option.
It’s a crappy compromise but what is the alternative? - are we to pass up an opportunity to reduce the level of harm and abuse merely because total liberation is not (yet) possible? It’s not like women would suddenly have full equality even if FGM is abandoned overnight, there are and will continue to be other battles to fight. Lots of them.
Also.
I agree there is a risk that medicalising FGM could lead to the idea that it is condoned by the professionals who carry it out - and that this could delay the total elimination of FGM. On the other hand, I think there is a real opportunity that medicalising FGM could allow health and other messages to actually *accelerate* cultural change because those same professionals, if they command respect in the community, will also have the opportunity to influence attitudes towards disapproval of FGM rather than acceptance.
So basically I’m saying that the possibility that medicalisation will delay total elimination of FGM is very uncertain - whereas the opportunity to make it safer right now is very clear.
The parallels with NHS hymenoplasty and the regulation of legal prostitution / pornography are on the same level I guess - harm reduction strategies that (potentially at least) may get in the way of the far-off goal of harm elimination. Easy to refuse short term compromises if it’s not my body. But if it were, I would pick harm reduction every time.
Everyone has brought up excellent points, and this is why feminists are great.
Of course no one can anticipate how medicalising a procedure will turn out and the thought of it actually *accelerating* positive social / cultural change Maia is definitely a conceivable outcome that I had not considered.
Devil’s advocate breezes into the room— I’m thinking of medicalised abortions here; after taken out of the hands of the lay practitioners (where together with legalisation of course) terminations are generally now viewed as culturally acceptable. Do the anti-choicers rue the day abortions were taken out of the hands of the back-street abortionists and handed over to the clinicians ?
On a personal level I seem to have unearthed more than what I bargained for and have been left with even more questions and uncertainties.
For example would it be unethical to oppose clinical FGM where it would drive the practice back to rusty knives and sutures made of thorns.
Professionally within substance misuse counselling I have usually worked within a harm reduction model. Unless the agency employed a total abstinence programme. (which I usually turned a blind eye to anyway if I thought it would help)
So even though I’m an advocate for radical social change, I’m hoping that harm reduction can be adopted if it is going to mean less suffering in the short term while we get to task for the long term goals.
I’m aware I sound as if I’m totally contradicting my self here, but I feel all over the freaking place with it and quite stumped.
Let me try to make it easier for you sparkleM by repeating my question - would we be comfortable if FGM was legalised and performed on the NHS? I think the answer would be a resounding no, at least on my part.
Yes of course safe FGM is better than unsafe AGM - but that doesn’t make it good, just slightly less bad. I think there’s an element of this happening a long way away and it seeming somehow unreal - so we have to ask ourselves, well would be comfortable with it happening on our doorstep? And also in your substance misuse counselling you were working with adults who were harming themselves and had a choice, even if may not have seemed like that to them - that’s a big difference from children having harm inflicted on them in the name of culture, religion or anything else. And incidentally our record in this country is less than fabulous on this. Despite the practice having been illegal since 1985 in 2005 there still hadn’t been any prosecutions.
http://www.unicef.org.uk/unicefuk/policies/policy_detail.asp?policy=12
I don’t think this IS one of those cases, like abortion where making something illegal is going to make it substantially worse, but it will still carry on happening. If there were prosecutions and proper application of the law in this country we could virtually stamp out FGM in the UK. And we should be making aid to other countries contingent on them outlawing the practice and taking steps to implement it.
Anti FGM campaigns do work, though they don’t work immediately - nothing does - this is a really ancient article but it shows what was happening ten years ago (it does refer to some countries making the procedure legal in hospitals). It also shows how to offer an alternative.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/medical_notes/241221.stm
Polly - I actually agree with everything you say, but, I also see where Maia is coming from. I also agree that safe FGM doesn’t make it ‘good’ and that was not my intention at all. I think it is evil and hideous - period. I’m disturbed that anyone thinks I may believe *any* form of FGM be anything else but repulsive. Clean or not. In addition, my drugs work was not an analogy but more a model of how you may ‘hold’ a poor situation until there is space for constructive change.
Okay, I appreciate I’m being emotive about this situation as all I can see right now is the faces of those terrified little girls in the slide show and yeah I just want to make it safer for them until the patriarchy gets taken to task for their hatred and FGM, breast ironing and everything else — and are addressed as human rights violations.
Maybe I’m too emotionally invested in this to think rationally and clearly. It horrifies me that women in 2008 are even having a discussion about how to stop men demanding that little girls genitals are mutilated. And what is going to reduce suffering until they get their act together.
Would we be comfortable if FGM was legalised and performed on the NHS? I think the answer would be a resounding no, at least on my part.
Mine too. But possibly the context difference is important here.
The scale of FGM in this country, even among communities that traditionally practice FGM in their country of origin, is NOTHING LIKE the scale of FGM in the places we are talking about. Many countries or tribes have 90% or greater cutting rates - and we know from all the current research on FGM abandonment campaigns that stopping FGM or significantly reducing the numbers is a long haul. And we also know that the complications from “unsafe FGM” can be horrendous even on top of the mutilation itself.
Also, as far as I know there is little evidence about rates or safety of FGM in the UK - the lack of prosecutions may suggest that there are few or perhaps even no cases where serious complications arise (since if they did, the matter would surely come to light when the girl had to go to hospital, and I hope we would have heard about that).
So we aren’t talking about a situation in the UK where legalisation and NHS provision of FGM will have any significant harm reduction benefits. Nor are we talking about a culture where legalisation of FGM would be tolerated in any mainstream social groups.
On the other hand, the cultures where FGM is routinely practised will normally (a) both tolerate legal FGM, and generally ignore any laws that ban it, and (b) have lots of scope for harm reduction by making FGM safer while we carry on working to eliminate it altogether. Still harmful but, as you say, slightly less bad (or in the case of girls who die from infections or other complications, a lot less bad).
As I said, I am very much a reluctant apologist for free FGM centres - it’s just that from a pragmatic point of view I can see harm reduction benefits and the opportunity to use these centres as a lever towards total abandonment.
Sparkle - the analogy with legalising abortion had occurred to me as well. And I think what’s interesting about that is that legalisation has *not* stifled public debate about the rights and wrongs. I’m not an abortion historian or anything, but the impression I get is that abortion was seen as pretty normal by many people here and in other countries even before it was legalised - and is seen as heinous murder by many people even now.
Everyone has brought up excellent points, and this is why feminists are great.
Yep
WHY are we comparing abortion with FGM? The former is a necessity for women in this day and age to control their reproduction (in a culture that is all hush-hush about contraceptive use and REAL sex education), the latter is a disgusting practice based completely on men’s desire to control women’s bodies. Therefore, the arguments of comparing the Westernized medicalization of abortion and FGM are obsolete.
And what’s up with this idea, poly sterene, that prostitutes “choose” their situation?
What needs to be done is to eradicate this idea in many cultures (including Western cultures) that the female body is “dirty” in itself, that the woman’s “psychology” is muddled by the natural presence of her genitalia, that if she is not cut she will be a raging slut sleeping around with every man. It just goes to show you how hateful and afraid men are of women and their bodies. These IDEAS need to be counter-acted in the public, the public needs to learn that women’s bodies as they are are wonderful and beautiful and should not be controlled by others, especially men.
Lara - no one is comparing abortion with FGM, what is being compared / examined is the ramifications of the medicalisation of surgical procedures. I.e. it normalises and regularises a specific medical intervention. I suggested would that be wise in the case of FGM? Because of it’s success (medicalisation) in termination of pregnancy. Which obviously is a positive thing.
Hi Lara - I actually said prostitutes are exercising a degree of (highly compromised) choice - which isn’t the same as saying they have chosen their situation, but an acknowledgement of the fact that as adults (I am assuming here that the woman in question is neither underage, nor has been trafficked) they still have some degree of control over it, which is obviously not the case with children being forced to undergo FGM. The idea was to highlight the differences between a situation where harm reduction is an appropriate intervention and where it isn’t.
No, FGM isn’t the same ‘argument’ as legalised/backstreet abortions.
I acknowledge Maia’s points, and it’s coming from a place of ’something is better than nothing’ or ’safer is better than rusty knives’, but I am more in the same camp as Polly Styrene on this, it is window dressing a barbaric practice that should face full human-rights sanctions. The little-by-little ’softly softly’ approach is largely ineffective in any of this, in many ways, it is an all-or-nothing issue (although I acknowledge, it does take time).
What it should be, is for the international community to butt its nose in and say “this is completely fucked” (but in better language) and untertake the cultural re-education. It is a difficult one to ‘police’, as most of the mutilations are carried out by (well-meaning, surviving under patriarchy) females — and I don’t want to see them unfairly shoulder the burden of the practice (but at the same time, not give the message for it to continue, or be acceptable to continue).
It would only take one generation to be elimated.
This all sounds of course as ol’ whitey layin’ down the law, and to a certain extent it is, but the WOC have little power in the equation, and as much as I don’t like the butting in, we should use the little power we (white wimms) can muster to protest/stop the mutilations to young females?
I’ve spent way too much time today than what I actually had free; trying to get some insight into this, and I’ve realised what I’m doing here. I’m not solely coming from a place of political or feminist analysis but also from a nursing perspective. It’s difficult for me not to have these considerations as it has been my occupation for 20 years.
I now see the debate over medicalisation of FGM as a moral / ethical dilemma - for me anyway. Do we protect girls / women’s health at the expense of legitimating a destructive practice? Or do we hasten the eradication of a hazardous practice while allowing girls / women to die from preventable conditions? Of course neither approach does anything to address demand.
I seriously don’t know and quite frankly it’s all looking a bit big. I’ve had a look at the nursing / medical journals and yes a huge debate rages on.
Taken from the Lancet.
That Lancet extract is totally on point isn’t it?
Especially: “There is no support for the common belief that medicalisation is a step towards abandonment of FGM/C”
I still can’t, emotionally, let go of the idea of children screaming in a dirty hut. Maybe I am too “preoccupied by the health aspect”, huh. But my gut still says, stop the screaming now, stop the deaths now, and sort out the misogyny after.
You know Maia, it disturbs the shit out of me that we even NEED these conversations. From what I have gathered today the nursing / medical professions while initially in favour of medicalisation are now becoming critical. It has in effect become an ethical dilemma.
But my gut still says, stop the screaming now, stop the deaths now, and sort out the misogyny after.
But what about the women/girls left to the slaughter now?
No comfort for them after being mutilated.
“it disturbs the shit out of me that we even NEED these conversations”
Me too. It’s totally sick that this kind of dilemma even exists.
whichever way you slice it, the women lose until the world changes - i don’t mean the whole world order (oh please please please!); just the bit that allows this; as you say, it could take just a generation (hah - ‘just’
to stop it. who might do it?
international human rights lawyers? particularly of colour, particularly women - and for once the door may be, if not actually open, at least badly locked, because the imbalance in the profession is least marked in the human rights area (hardly surprising).
i’m going to do some research with some of the organisations i’ve come up agaianst and see what i can find out. may not lead to anything, but doing something is better than wringing my white male hands about something that isn’t threatening me directly.
Yes SW - WHO, UNICEF, and UNFPA all have human rights lawyers working with them.
Cherie Blair is a human rights lawyer and I know she has spoke of the position of women in Islam, but I can’t find anything about her speaking about FGM.
well maybe it needs the next generation of lawyers to start getting it on the agenda. let’s see where this takes us…
and while i doubt an email to cherie and her chambers will be a magic solution, it would be foolish of me not to send one - will assume it’s ok to link to the post.
Good idea oh lawyerish person…