Is FGM Worth Fighting About in Africa?

There was a women's organization in a town on the Somaliland-Ethiopia border at which the leaders I interviewed championed both the tradition of female genital surgery (FGM/S) as a means of preventing promiscuity among girls, as well as the tradition of forced marriage, even between a rapist and his victim.

When I asked for deeper clarifications, the women told a story of how a girl had flirted with an older man. Finally, the man stalked her, caught her alone at night, beat her, cut her with a knife, and then raped her.

After she recovered in the hospital, her parents brought the case to their clan elders who, defying the state law, were so concerned about the girl no longer being qualified for marriage that they ordered the rapist to marry her. The women I interviewed then said after the wedding and her recovery, the girl finally fell in love with the man. They found peace and started a family.

The topic of FGM and how it relates to relationships is so controversial across the African Horn that many international rights advocates are trapped in a ferocious moral dilemma. The story above is not common, nor is it possible to qualify whether the girl could be happy in that situation, but it does highlight a debate which still plagues the rural areas.

Change.org Women's Rights blogger Sarah Menkedick wrote a post this past December highlighting the challenges in reconciling urgent goals for protecting women's rights with the right to protect cultural traditions.

"Is Cultural Relativism at Odds with Women's Rights?" ignited a healthy debate on the subject. Some rights advocates call for immediate global prohibition of FGM, forced marriage, and other traditions while others believe that the right to indigenous traditions deserves higher protection. Although there are many topics overlapping in this dilemma, I'm compelled to break out FGM and "rape marriage" and clarify the conundrum here with intensive research I conducted in Somalia in 2007 along with updates from today's debate. Be forewarned, this topic is more complex than one would think, and might be disturbing to anyone with developed empathy.

One Change.org reader responding to Sarah's post wrote, "The women of these cultures are proud of this ritual. This is by their choice!! I think you are all interfering with their proudest moment." And she recommended "Three Maasai Women Have Their Say."

Westerners and some survivors of the practice have focused the pro-FGM argument on the minority of cases which sound similar to the medical and Judeo-Christian-Muslim practice of circumcising boys. A bit of flesh is cut away from the genital area. However, circumcision for boys in the developed world is meant for the prevention of infection or for religious identity, while circumcision for girls is to remind them not to act promiscuously. In fact, the topic is much, much more complex and, well, gory.

To clarify, I'll describe the Somali FGM situation. For two large humanitarian agencies who now own the content, my Somali colleagues and I ran a national survey on child justice across the entire north half of the country, including Puntland and Somaliland. We got about 1,800 households at 63 representative sites to fill out a questionnaire that included one or two related questions. We also interviewed about 60 elder councils, 50 women's organizations, and more.

For centuries the Somali tradition of FGM had already been dissolving, slowly. The original practice involves mothers, desperately concerned that their now 12-year-old daughter will be promiscuous and unmarriable, removing their clitoris completely and then sewing their vulva closed from top to bottom except for the necessary space for urination and menstruation.

They then pressed the girl's legs together and wrapped them in a cloth so that the girl could not walk for a week or more, in order for flesh to grow over the wound. This made parents absolutely sure that the girl would not be de-flowered before her wedding night. Few Westerners understand that the tradition comes with an additional chapter. On her wedding night, the husband must use a knife and cut that replacement flesh away in order to re-open the vagina.

Either during the original surgery or during the wedding night, the girl can be threatened by heavy bleeding, if not infections. If she is unlucky and lives far from medical facilities like most Somalis, her infection could kill her.

Over decades of very careful, patient efforts by local women leaders, the UN, and rights agencies to negotiate this, there has been some compromise success in what public health experts call "positive deviation." Aid agencies highlight these as best examples, while not highlighting cases like that of supporting a rapist's right to attack and marry a young girl.

That harsh tradition, often known as "Pharaonic" FGM, persists, but in other communities women leaders have been able to mainstream a moderate form of FGM in which the sewing of the vulva is only symbolic, or an even softer version in which the clitoridectomy is only slight thus preserving some feeling. By applauding the families who on their own accord (and because they fear their daughters will have medical troubles) choose the lighter form of FGM, the women's rights leaders have found a functional, if slow, means of reconciling the battle between girl's rights and rights to tradition.

My most memorable moment in an otherwise arduous survey, conducted partly across a war zone, came when I was interviewing councils of elders about FGM. Our team would ask each council whether they normally included women as advisors for child disputes. That way we were able to map out which villages had a positive model for women's participation versus those who forbade women from council discussions. And once we got to the topic of FGM I would scare the daylights out of my interpreter.

"What does FGM mean to you?" I would ask. "Do you think it is an issue for traditional, Islamic, or state law?" And so on. They would proudly reply:

"We use FGM to prevent girls from being promiscuous." One clever woman leader explained: "If the door's locked, ain't no one getting in."

Feigning ignorance, I would ask, "What do you do to prevent male promiscuity?"

"Men choose a girl, and he takes her as he pleases," was a common rural response.

"Do fathers ever wish to protect their daughter's honor by curtailing the boy's promiscuity instead of the girls?"

Silence.

"If boys are the ones choosing the girls, has anyone considered whether FGM should be done to boys instead?"

Blink. Blink. The men uncrossed and re-crossed their legs. My interpreter thought the guys would clobber me. I act innocent, curious. Suddenly, the old men would burst into laughter.

"Wow," some said, "We never thought of it that way."

After all this, I came to the conclusion that FGM in all its forms as a tradition is no more worth protecting than the tradition of child beatings, wife rape, or molestation.

What about the women who protect this tradition of risking a girl's health and removing her ability to have pleasure during intercourse in order to prevent her from being promiscuous?

There are other traditional means to reduce promiscuity that do not include trauma. For one, rights advocates should highlight and applaud traditional communities that have evolved to not have this practice on their own for health or other logical reasons.

Ultimately, the great rally point for traditionalists seeking to reduce promiscuity should be on prosecuting men who attack and manipulate girls, not on traumatizing girls with this tradition and letting the men use them as they please.

Here's UNIFEM's Platform for Action on FGM.

Photo credit: Daniel J Gerstle (Rural home in Somalia)