Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: A UK Perspective (Routledge, 2015)
> Hilary Burrage has written the most definitive book ever on FGM. An invaluable tool to help eradicate it worldwide. A personal triumph. (The Guardian)
> … Outraged at ineffective child protection, Burrage provides a comprehensive, scholarly yet accessible guide – the first ethically correct textbook in the world about FGM and among the best ever – to professionals and all people of conscience. (Tobe Levin von Gleichen, Harvard and Oxford Universities)
> The best book ever written about the sensitive subject of FGM : Amazon.com ***** (Sayydah Garrett, Pastoralist Child Foundation)
** Obtainable in bookshops world-wide and from the Routledge (publisher) UK website / US website; or, for world-wide sales, contact Routledge (Taylor and Francis) here.
~ ~ ~
Estimates vary, but well over 20,000 babies and children in the UK are thought to be at serious risk of female genital mutilation (FGM). Probably somewhere around 140,000 women and girls living in Britain have experienced, or are serious risk of experiencing, FGM. Available data for continental Europe and the USA suggest about half a million people may have been harmed in each case. The global number of women and girls now living with FGM is staggering, thought until 2015 to be perhaps 140 million, and in 2024 revealed by UNFPA and the WHO to be around 230 million.
These figures indicate fundamental human rights and complex public health challenges on a extraordinary scale for western nations, as well as for those in the developing world. FGM and other violence against women and girls is the responsibility of everyone, everywhere.
My book, Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation, seeks to identify pathways, particularly in Britain and other first-world countries, to a future without female genital mutilation. The focus is on understanding how FGM has become so prevalent in modern nations (such as – but by no means exclusively – the UK, the USA, Australia and some western European states) and via that understanding to seek ways to ensure this harmful traditional practice is eradicated as soon as possible. This website provides (where necessary and possible) updated information – currently till 2024 – and is where I welcome comments, corrections, new information and contacts, and readers’ ideas relating to that discussion.
Whilst substantial reference must be made in all publications about FGM to practice, traditions and legislation in non-western and developing nations, the methodologies for FGM eradication in any given location are obviously influenced by widely differing local cultures and norms. Detailed consideration of ways forward in nations which do not largely share modern western understandings – absolutely vital as such consideration is – reaches beyond the competence and scope of the current publication. The examinations of fundamental aspects of FGM and its cessation which run throughout Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation may however helpfully inform the issues as they present across the globe.
Your contributions to all these conversations are warmly welcome.
Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation, by Hilary Burrage (October 2015), is available worldwide from Amazon, all good bookshops and via the Routledge website.
Hilary has also written a book, Female Mutilation (New Holland Press, 2016), available via Amazon. This book relates the experience of FGM via the narratives of some seventy survivors, activists, involved professionals and others in over twenty countries across five continents. The associated website is Female Mutilation Worldwide.
Details of Hilary’s other academic chapters and published papers are located on her professional website, as are all her recent commentaries and articles on FGM. Increasingly, she has framed FGM and other gendered violence as Patriarchy Incarnate, focusing largely on the economic and environmental contexts in which FGM is likely to occur.
Please see also FURTHER INFORMATION in regard to the wider contexts of FGM and connections with others in the field, and for guidance on posting Comments on these pages. Thank you.
Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation 