*Warning: political.*
The UN Human Rights Commission is calling for a ban on female genital mutilation. Good on them! Now, practically speaking, such a ban from the UN does nothing. But it's some high minded rhetoric from a respected international body on rights, meaning that it gives aid and social workers a talking point. If national governments do more than just agree with this that would be helpful. The UN is calling for education efforts, which would be great.
I can't imagine this will change anything in remote villages, at least not fast. Because even if a national government is totally in favor of this and outlaws it, well, what then? To be useful, a government should have the resources to actually protect girls from the practice, which includes education campaigns to change a culture in which the girls want to be circumcised for reasons of status, and the ability to usefully respond to a situation in which a circumcision still happens.
I don't see prosecution, even assuming a meaningful justice system, doing anything to end the practice. Parents do it to their children because they believe it's the thing to do to their children adn will resent interference. For another thing, the people who perform FGM are usually respected members of the community, so the victim might be blamed for a respected elder being put in jail. Unless the government has the resources to care for and relocate a victim (assuming the poor girl speaks something other than the tribal language and will still have access to education such that she will be able to support herself away from her family) prosecution is actually going to make the situation much worse for the victim.
Tanzania has outlawed the practice of FGM for some time now, and according to a schoolgirl I talked to in Morogoro, therefore no one does it. She may be a tad optimistic. It is well known that FGM occurs among the Maasai tribe, and there are lots of NGOs (non-government organizations) spending a lot of money to try to change this. On a grass roots level, a friend of mine who volunteers on the Maasai steppe with the African Wildlife Foundation is good friends with a lot of Maasai men and she has gotten a very positive response from casual conversations in which she explains to men in graphic detail what they need to do to make their wives want to have sex with them more often. Note that in Tanzania, fast and dry is the ideal sexual encounter. So my friend talks about foreplay and fingering and the role of the clitoris and lots of other fun stuff, and the men are fascinated and want to learn more. Opposing misogynistic practices like FGM in terms of better sex for men is, of course, not ideal, but behavior change happens slowly and for reasons that people already agree with. Next step, trying to change a culture in which a woman's moral compass is supposed to be between her legs, and remove the major justification for FGM, i.e., women are huge sluts who must be prevented with extreme measures from having sex except under controlled circumstances.
The Maasai, however, are a bit of a special tribe in that foreigners are willing to pay good money to study and photograph them. The less cool tribes don't get that amount of foreign aid. Besides which, Maasai are not ethnically Bantu, unlike most of the rest of Tanzania, and are generally the butt of jokes told about groups of people. (E.g. restaurants that advertise their form will often include at the end the phrase "na kingine" meaning "and others." It's the etc. phrase of Kiswahili. The joke is that it is the Maasai who walks into the restaurant and tries to order the na kingine.) So it may also be the case that the Tanzanian government is more than willing to other Maasai, because people are always more in favor of cultural change when it happens to definitely other cultures that can be conveniently looked down on. How much of a problem FGM is among other tribes here I'm not in a good position to know, in that I have always been in towns, which tend to be cosmopolitan enough to not have strong tribal identities. A lady I met in Babati did tell me about a tribe in the Manyara area that spends all their time singing and dancing, but is very misogynistic and practices FGM, but I forget the name of this tribe. Also, I don't just ask about FGM, or actually about anything that might seem obviously a sensitive subject. If people ask me about something sensitive, I take that to mean they feel comfortable about it and respond as best I can, but I am not the one to bring these things up. A paper from Mzumbe university citing sources from about 10 years ago suggests that about 18% of women in Tanzania suffer from FGM and about 20 out of the 150 tribes practice it, and there's a newspaper article from fairly recently talking about the practice up in the Mara region, so I'm going to say it's quite the issue.
By the way, this does happen in developed nations, usually among diaspora populations, as the UN points out. Most well-known (to me at least) are the cases of girls in Britain taken to other countries to visit their relatives and cut while there. Infuriatingly enough, I cannot imagine the US doing anything to about this because the justification behind FGM is that it prevents women from having extramarital sex, and it is STILL a serious talking point for the US whether easy access to contraceptives and life-saving vaccines like HPV will encourage women to have sex. Sluttiness: still more of a concern than health. Grr.
Anyway, I'm still happy that the UN is trying to make a gesture. If money can get thrown into good education campaigns, that will be even better.
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