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Yesterday, lawmakers in Gambia voted to advance legislation that would legalize female genital cutting. Local analysts believe it is likely to pass.
Women have achieved so much social progress worldwide. Yet genital cutting is still on the rise. Today, 230 million women and girls around the world have been cut, a 15 percent rise from 2016. In Africa and the Middle East, several countries still permit the practice, and in many others, laws are erratically enforced.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why cutting — which for most communities means removing the clitoris and the labia minora, or almost sealing up the vagina — has been so hard to stamp out.
Fighting a ritual
Most of the people who’ve been cut are from Africa. The practice is almost universal in Somalia and in Guinea, and more than 80 percent of girls undergo the procedure in Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Mali and Sierra Leone. But it also happens in some communities in Iraq, Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia.
In Africa, the population is growing faster than efforts to stop genital mutilation, which explains why the number of girls who are cut is rising.
Most anti-cutting campaigners locate the roots of the custom in ideas about virginity and control over women’s sexuality. Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered mummies from the fifth century B.C. with mutilated genitals. An archaeologist who studies sites in Somaliland says cutting began as a form of divine sacrifice. Other scholars argue that it is spread across such a vast array of cultures that it was adopted independently by different groups.
Cutting was first recognized as a human rights violation in 1993, in a United Nations resolution. In 1995, governments met in Beijing and pledged to work toward eliminating female genital mutilation. Organizations like the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, led the charge in the 2000s, framing it as a human rights issue.
But getting communities to abandon longstanding cultural traditions proved difficult. Laws often went unenforced. Even when they are in place, parents may have their daughters cut because they consider social ostracism to be harsher than legal penalties.
Gambia forbade genital cutting in 2015. The government didn’t try in earnest to enforce the ban until last year. Then local religious leaders revolted. They started a movement to overturn the measure.
Campaigners have had more success listening to communities and talking to them about the downsides of cutting — including severe pain, infections, complications in childbirth and of course the refusal to let women and girls determine what happens to their bodies.
My colleague Stephanie Nolen recently wrote about Burkina Faso. There, anti-cutting advocates worked with religious leaders, especially young ones, to change people’s minds. As a result, the share of girls between ages 15 and 19 who were cut has fallen by about half in the past three decades, to 39 percent.
Grass-roots persuasion
Pro-cutting voices have often portrayed bans as a Western imposition. Criticism of the West and of neocolonialism is on the rise across Africa, particularly among digitally connected young people, so this message could catch on. Africa’s population is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years. And the population is growing quickly in countries where cutting is the most entrenched, meaning many more girls could be cut in the coming decades.
One Gambian anti-cutting advocate I spoke to, Fatou Baldeh, thought cutting could be ended in a generation. After all, a woman who has not been cut is unlikely to have her daughter cut. But campaigners will have to work quicker and smarter to win over the people who believe it is a sacrosanct cultural ritual. In some places, more women than men say the practice should persist. Reaching them will require outreach and persuasion. Experts say there has not been enough in Gambia.
Baldeh said the bill to overturn the ban — and the silence from people she thought would speak against it — made her realize that cutting had deeper roots than she’d understood. Gambian lawmakers were afraid to touch it. They voted 42-4 to advance the bill that would eventually repeal the measure.
Related: Young women in Sierra Leone are defying their mothers and grandmothers by refusing to undergo genital cutting.
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