Spotlighting Female Genital Mutilation: An Insidious Human Rights Crisis
Picture Credit: "6 February 2014. International Day of Zero Tolerance of Female Genital Mutilation." by MONUSCO is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Last month, the BBC reported the death of a one-month-old baby girl who had been subjected to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the Gambia—a country that is one of 10 countries with the highest rates of FGM despite the practice having been outlawed there since 2015.
This incident incited nationwide outrage against FGM and decidedly affirmed its status as one of the most egregious manifestations of gender-based violence in the world today. FGM encompasses “all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons” and is mostly performed on girls between the ages of 5 and 9. For this reason, FGM is “recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights, the health, and the integrity of girls and women.” Unfortunately, despite its deleterious effects on the lives, health, safety, and well-being of approximately 200 million girls and women worldwide, FGM continues to be revered as a “cultural tradition” in adherent societies.
Understanding FGM through Gendered and Socio-psychological Lenses
At their core, hetero-patriarchal ideologies that perpetuate and sustain the practice of FGM are rooted in sexism and an irrational fear of the supposed dangers of (uncontrolled) female sexuality. To its modern-day proponents, FGM is not only a prerequisite for marriage but also a rite of passage into “respectable” womanhood, as it is believed to guarantee female chastity and increased male sexual pleasure. Moreover, since unmutilated women and their families often experience severe social ostracism and stigmatisation at the community level, FGM is regarded as an important “part of the initiation ritual for women and girls into the society.”
In that connection, much like extreme hazing rituals in Western societies, FGM operates as a gateway to culturally policed social acceptance in adherent societies—despite the considerable personal harm and even fatal repercussions it occasions.
FGM and Human Rights Law
At present, the countries with the highest prevalence of FGM among girls and women aged 15 to 49 are Somalia at 98 per cent, Guinea at 97 per cent, and Djibouti at 93 per cent. Whether medicalized or not, FGM violates a panoply of human rights, which include the rights to life; the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health; protection from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse; freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and protection from sex-based discrimination. Quite significantly, these rights are enshrined in several regional human rights instruments that Somalia, Guinea, and Djibouti have all ratified or acceded to, including the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights 1981 (the Banjul Charter, see articles 2, 3, 4, 5, 16, and 19) as well as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child 1990 (see articles 3, 5, 16, and 21). In addition, both Guinea and Djibouti have also ratified the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa 2003 (the Maputo Protocol), which is the first human rights instrument to frontally address the issue of FGM. Among other things, the Maputo Protocol enjoins States Parties to prohibit and condemn FGM and all other forms of harmful practices that “negatively affect the human rights of women and which are contrary to recognised international standards.” To this end, article V of the Maputo Protocol urges States Parties to prohibit ‘through legislative measures backed by sanctions, all forms of FGM, scarification, medicalisation and para-medicalisation of female genital mutilation and all other practices to eradicate them.’
‘…It is imperative that global efforts to eradicate FGM address the interplay of cultural, gendered, economic and socio-psychological factors…’
Under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969, which codified the principle of pacta sunt servanda, when States Parties ratify or accede to legally enforceable human rights instruments, they have ipso facto agreed to be bound by their provisions. As such, all States Parties to the aforementioned human rights instruments are obligated to respect, protect, and fulfil the rights of their girls and women to live free from the violence of FGM.
Towards the eradication of FGM regionally and beyond
On December 20, 2021, the United Nations General Assembly passed a historic resolution imploring all members of the international community to eradicate FGM. To date, FGM is legally proscribed in several adherent societies including but not limited to: Burkina Faso; Ghana; Senegal; Djibouti; and Guinea. Nevertheless, this legal interdiction against FGM has not resulted in the eradication or even drastic reduction of FGM in those jurisdictions, two of which continue to record some of the highest FGM prevalence rates in the world. As a consequence, the right of women and girls to be free from the violence of FGM is guaranteed de jure but not de facto—a status quo that significantly undermines their enjoyment of substantive equality with boys and men.
Thus, it is imperative that global efforts to eradicate FGM address the interplay of cultural, gendered, economic and socio-psychological factors that sustain it and relegate dissidents to communal marginality. Certainly, its discernible reduction in certain adherent societies demonstrates that meaningful progress is possible when education, poverty alleviation to combat the economic disempowerment that often compels families to venerate FGM as a kind of “investment” that facilitates their escape from extreme poverty, and cultural transformation converge, particularly at the community level.
A focus on effecting community-level transformation is especially crucial given the documented experiences with individually-focused FGM abandonment programmes, like CARE in Kenya, which have exposed supporters to coercive sanctions where community-driven transformation has not taken place. Within this context, engendering local institutional buy-in has proven useful in empowering communities to abandon FGM on their own terms by facilitating the introduction of alternative rites of passage. This approach is having a “positive impact” in adherent societies such as Kenya and Tanzania. Moreover, encouraging—through education and respectful community engagement—the communal adoption of FGM-abandonment pledges, which contributed to the elimination of foot binding in China in one generation, could also yield promising results.
Finally, empowering women economically, through education, and elevating their social status, especially within communities, must be seen as central to the project of eradicating FGM since it will better position them to “participate in a process of community consensus around norms upholding the protection of the rights of women and children.” The eradication of FGM regionally and beyond can only be achieved by addressing the cultural, gendered, economic, and psycho-sociological drivers of conformity by implementing culturally relatable models that effect sustainable change at the community level.
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