Eradication vs. Abandonment: Changing Community Social Norms Around FGM
By Kacey Archer, University of Chicago
Humanitarian intervention is often caught between two frequently conflicting ideals: universal human rights and a society’s entitlement to cultural autonomy. In some cases, the rights of an individual and the rights of a community appear to be so deeply incompatible that addressing inhumane cultural practices seems all but impossible. Nowhere is this dilemma more apparent than with female genital mutilation (FGM), where international response to the practice has shifted between cautious respect for an important tradition and horror at how it robs girls of their bodily autonomy. Because of its deep historical roots and cultural significance, it has proved stubbornly resistant to attempts to eliminate it. But while respect for cultural autonomy and intervention in an inhumane cultural practice might initially seem incompatible, both are essential components to preventing the practice. Only by understanding how and why the practice occurs can one effectively argue for its abandonment. To successfully intervene in FGM, international organizations must understand and facilitate the conditions necessary for change while respecting the cultural autonomy of the communities it affects.
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), also known as Female Genital Cutting (FGC), comprises a series of practices that partially or fully remove external female genitalia and, in some cases, narrow the vaginal opening. Although it is observed across the world, the practice is especially widespread in regions of Africa. Despite its negative effects on women’s sexual and reproductive health, FGM continues to be pervasive. While practitioners continue the custom for many reasons, including its religious significance, purported hygienic benefits, and perceived role in preserving a woman’s virginity, one of the biggest is the social acceptance it incurs. When living in a society where a woman’s ability to marry is essential to her economic security, community members continue to practice FGM because it is seen as a prerequisite to marriage. Even individuals who privately oppose FGM often continue to perform it on their daughters because the rest of their community supports it, and would not allow their sons to marry someone who didn’t conform to the practice. FGM is self-enforcing: everyone does it because everyone else does it, and no one wants to risk the social ostracization that comes with nonconformity. Changing social norms around FGM must involve the collective action of the entire community to alleviate the peer pressure that perpetuates the practice.
While FGM initially appears to be an unchangeable custom, historical examples of successful foreign intervention can be analyzed and applied to FGM. One such example can be found in the movement to end footbinding in China, a practice that involved stunting the growth of women’s feet to conform to traditional beauty standards. Although FGM and footbinding are performed in very different societies, they also share similarities: both involve the alteration of girls’ bodies, are deeply ingrained customs seen as a prerequisite to marriage, and are perpetuated by the pressure to conform. Yet, while footbinding ended within a generation, FGM persists despite significant international criticism. In this way, the factors that led to the end of footbinding can provide a model to facilitate change with FGM.
Before Western colonialism, some Chinese groups had already expressed opposition to footbinding, and a Manchu government unsuccessfully attempted to ban it. When Western missionaries became involved, they focused instead on addressing two underlying reasons for the proliferation of footbinding: societal pressure to conform and its status as an important cultural tradition. In their initial opposition to foot binding, they focused their energy on creating change within the Chinese Christian community, a population they had far more sway with than the greater non-Christian Chinese population. Missionaries convinced churches to refuse membership to individuals whose daughters had bound feet. In doing so, they effectively flipped this standard of conformity on its head; instead of fearing ostracization for abandoning the practice, members of the Chinese Christian community were now outcasts if they perpetuated it. Over time, these efforts expanded to include the broader non-Christian elite, culminating in the formation of the Natural Foot Society in 1895. Western missionaries and their allies effectively created an alternate community for those opposed to foot binding, freeing individuals from the fear that without conformity, their daughters would not have a future.
Instead of opposing the practice from a feminist or Eurocentric lens, the anti-footbinding movement argued within the cultural context of the non-Christian Chinese community. Western missionaries simply borrowed and amplified the pre-existing arguments espoused in historical efforts to end footbinding by Chinese individuals. Some of the most common arguments made included:
“1. It is unfilial, damaging the body, a gift from one's parents…
4. It represents a deviation from the ideal social order, for the documentary evidence suggests that the ancients did not practice it.”
By using Confucianism to argue against the custom, they refuted foot binding not on their only cultural terms, but within the terms of the community who practiced it. By making their case in this manner, they showed that a condemnation of footbinding was not a condemnation of the culture intertwined with it. Rather, the perpetuation of footbinding was fundamentally at odds with the broader identity and values of that culture. They separated the act from its perpetrators and gave room for grace, a necessity when attempting to create long-lasting change.
These two focuses of the anti-footbinding movement; combating the need for community conformity and respecting a community’s culture to better enact change within it, must be applied to the movement to end FGM. Progress is rarely sustainable when it doesn’t come with the permission and enthusiasm of the communities it targets, and an open dialogue that takes into consideration cultural differences is essential to this. Nowhere has this strategy been applied as effectively as with Tostan, an international NGO that works to combat FGM in Senegal, where roughly 50% of women experience it. Founded in 1991, the initiative was not initially created to address the practice. Instead, it offered workshops and broader issues and topics relevant to women’s lived experiences, where they could learn about everything from hygiene to project implementation and management. The program was designed to give women the resources, leadership skills, and education they needed to identify and address the most pressing issues within their communities. It so just happened that in the community of Malicounda-Bambara, the issue that participants wanted to tackle was FGM. While the movement to end FGM in this village was facilitated by Tostan’s training program, it was ultimately led by people within the community. Because of this, the leaders of the movement were able to better argue within the community’s cultural context because, for them, that context was reality. The specific actions they took to end FGM were directly informed by their understanding of the culture they lived in and what it would take to change it.
Ultimately, the movement recognized that for families to give up the practice, they had to be assured that it would not affect their daughters' social standing: “We are part of an inter-marrying community… unless all the villages involved take part [in abandonment], you are asking parents to forfeit the chance of their daughters getting married,” said Dema Diawara, a respected imam and influential ally to the movement. By emphasizing the importance of community leadership in the movement, Tostan made it easier to achieve the cultural understanding necessary for collective action to occur. Their choice to center the leadership of people from within affected communities also had a direct impact on how FGM opponents involved in the movement spoke about the custom. When entering into a dialogue with a practicing community, participants were careful not to condemn practitioners, nor rob them of their agency. They instead told them about their own choice not to continue FGM and why they made it. Although Tostan itself is an international NGO and an outsider to the communities it works in, it did not act like one. By providing women with the information, resources, and monetary support necessary to create the change they wanted to see within their communities, Tostan acted not as an external force attempting to eradicate FGM, but as an internal force creating the conditions necessary for communities to successfully choose to abandon it. The results were undeniable: not only did the village of Malicounda-Bambara publicly declare their abandonment of FGM, but all thirteen communities they intermarried with also decided to abandon the practice.
Intervention cannot force change. All it can do is facilitate the conditions under which it might occur and give communities the power and respect to make those changes for themselves. To finally end female genital mutilation, international organizations must work within the cultural context of the communities where it occurs and address the underlying factors keeping the practice in place. The effectiveness of this strategy can be seen both in historical case studies and in more modern initiatives. At the turn of the 20th century, Western missionaries were able to effectively spur the end of footbinding by alleviating community expectations to conform with the practice as a prerequisite to marriage and making arguments within the context of Confucianism. Tostan used the same approach to end FGM in Senegal and found similar results. By emphasizing the importance of understanding and respecting the individual conditions that lead to the perpetuation of FGM in each society, this strategy allowed international organizations to intervene effectively while still keeping the agency in the hands of the community. When it comes to FGM, cultural respect helps create the conditions necessary for a society to change itself.
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