Female Genital Mutilation: challenges and perspectives for change

Songs, dances, food, entertainment. A night of community celebrations. The next morning the women of your family take you to a room and hold you down. As an anaesthetic, most often, a bucket of ice-cold water left outside the house overnight. Then the cutting with any kind of sharp object takes place. Thus begins, for the most part, a practice of female genital mutilation.

Female genital mutilation is defined as all those procedures that involve the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons, according to the World Health Organisation. This practice is widespread mainly in Africa, and on a smaller scale also in Asia and the Middle East. Although it is illegal in most African states, the WHO estimates that more than 4 million girls undergo female genital mutilation every year, generally between the ages of 9 and 14. According to UNFPA statistics, there is a high probability that the number will further increase by the end of 2030.

MFGs are commonly divided into four categories, depending on whether the clitoris or labia minora are removed or infibulated, or whether infibulation or other harmful practices such as piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising the genital area are performed.

This practice has, in most cases, quite serious repercussions on the bodies of the girls and young women who undergo it, such as, for example, difficulty in having normal sexual intercourse, bleeding, infections, anaemia, malnutrition, severe pain during menstruation, especially in the case of infibulation, as well as a high rate of complications during childbirth and associated infant mortality.

Most of the time, the ceremony is not announced to the girls in the community, who cannot mentally prepare themselves for what they will be subjected to; this also frequently causes psychological problems arising from the traumatic nature of the event and the excruciating pain experienced during the operation.

Female genital mutilation is a violation of human rights recognised by the international community, such as the right to non-discrimination, the right to liberty and security of one's person, the right to integrity of women and girls, and the right to health.

But the difficulty in properly opposing FGM is the perception of the practice in communities. For some of them, for example, the procedure is believed to bring hygienic and aesthetic benefits and to promote the fertility of the girls, preserving their reputation: those who have not been mutilated are removed from the community as impure.

For other communities, such as the Maasai, FGM is motivated by the need to define the biological sex to which a person belongs, as it is believed that the clitoris is reminiscent of a penis and that removing it is the only remedy to eliminate all traces of sexual ambiguity.

In Egypt, Sudan and Somalia, female circumcision is seen as a way of guaranteeing a woman's virginity and, with it, the honour of the clan or family.

There are two main strands that intertwine in almost all cultures: considering mutilation as a dynamic of control of female sexuality, dulling, according to popular belief, the woman's sexual desire and making her subordination to the man easier, and seeing the practice of mutilation as a rite of passage that opens the doors of adulthood to the girls of the community and represents an acceptance of community values. This tradition thus takes on the role of a practice of preservation and legitimisation of the ethnic identity of the community, which, through social recognition, makes its own identity claim with respect to the majority culture.

It is therefore clear that, in light of the concept of rite of passage and community recognition and belonging that is attributed to this practice, thinking of eradicating it through the politics of rejection may lead to even more disastrous consequences.

An attempt at an intermediate way that seeks to reconcile, at least provisionally, the principle of respect for individual rights with that of respect for the culture to which one belongs is provided by the concept of symbolic ritual.

The purpose of the symbolic rite is to eradicate the practice of female mutilation by means of a gradual action, without prohibitionist impositions, aimed at eliminating the pain and the invasive and extremely harmful effects on the integrity and health of minors and women while maintaining, however, the symbolic charge of the act in itself, which is also very important for the women in the community.

At present, there have been various proposals for the implementation of this type of ritual, such as performing a symbolic puncture on the clitoris after anaesthesia, to removing a small flap of the legs of girls and young women, to an initiative carried out in Kenya by two organisations, We World and Amref Health Africa, regarding 'circumcision through words', which involves raising awareness among girls in the community on issues of reproductive health, hygiene, anatomy, and a day of collective celebrations with the entire community.

The alternative proposal of the symbolic ritual has received much criticism, since practising it would seem not to solve the problem of female subordination, but we can certainly say that it represents the beginning of a dialogue with the community, through which it is possible to install processes of change from within individual cultures, thus successfully overcoming this discriminatory and oppressive practice and respecting, at the same time, the right of identity proper to each community.

Translated by Flora Stanziola

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