Category: NoFGMUKBook

Welcome To The Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Website

Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: A UK Perspective (Ashgate / 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 Ashgate / Routledge (publisher) UK website / US website; or, for world-wide sales, contact Routledge (Taylor and Francis) here.

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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) in any one year. 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 2016 revealed by UNFPA and the WHO to be around 200 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 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.

Hilary Burrage

Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation, by Hilary Burrage (October 2015), is available worldwide from all good bookshops and via the Ashgate / Routledge website.

Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: Introduction

This book is not a comfortable read, nor has it been an easy book to write.

The subject is of itself both exceedingly unpleasant and very distressing to contemplate, even at a safely cerebral distance. Close up or at first hand female genital mutilation (FGM) is traumatising: harrowing to observe and painful beyond endurance to experience directly. It is sometimes lethal and often permanently damaging, both physically and psychologically. its consequences carry on through generations, as women who have undergone FGM encounter obstetric problems, and their children – boys and girls, both – in turn are more likely than others to die, or to live lives marred by their difficult entry into the world.

Every eleven seconds a girl baby, child or young woman somewhere in the world undergoes genital mutilation, often by force and without pain relief or asepsis. FGM is a global epidemic of immense proportions; 3 million mutilations are estimated to be carried out every year….

Continue reading “Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation: Introduction” →

Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 1: Demography and Epidemiology of FGM

Female genital mutilation is recognised internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women as discussed in the Introduction, it is a criminal and potentially lethal, almost always harmful, assault, both on a person’s body and on her mind.

Whilst however there is no dispute about the status of this abuse, ascertaining with any precision the incidence of female genital mutilation in any location (including the UK) is difficult, given both its general illegality and the intimate nature of the practice itself. Estimations of how frequently FGM occurs, and of the likelihood of risk for given populations, inevitably require informed guesswork and a considerable degree of sensitivity to the issues as they are interrogated.  

The damage caused by FGM is intensely personal and private, and even more so because the subjects are (most usually) minors who cannot give meaningful consent either to the procedure itself, or to any subsequent proposed medical examination. 

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 2: Socio-economic Analysis

Any serious look at the realities of female genital mutilation in modern Britain cannot be complete without an attempt at sociological analysis in parallel with empirical description and policy discussion.

FGM is a social and economic force as well as a fundamental issue around human rights and the imperative on us all to keep the most vulnerable and smallest members of our society safe.

It is important to consider how sociological and economic analysis can contribute to understandings of what FGM means in a modern, historically fully established Western society such as, but not exclusively, the nations of Europe, North America and Australia.

Sociology throws light on how FGM sits in the social order, and what its impacts for that order might be, overall and directly for those who experience it (whether at first hand or in other ways). Economics helps in considering the implications of FGM for the economies of communities and societies in which it is found.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 3: Perceptions and Beliefs Over Time

One of the most puzzling questions around genital mutilation is how it arose, such a long time ago and spontaneously, in totally unconnected parts of the world. To date, just as there is no commonality in how genital mutilation is practised, there is also no universal answer. Nonetheless, one of the most interesting responses to the puzzle has been, as medical historian David Gollaher suggests, to examine the meanings assigned to it, to ask what people believe they are doing when they perform genital ‘cutting’.

There is a widespread – but erroneous – belief that female genital mutilation is required by adherents to Islam (Muslims). The general perception of a direct connection between female genital mutilation and Islam arises largely because it is most often found in Muslim countries such as those of the sub-Sahara region. The reality, however, is that FGM is practised by various denominations and sects of Islam, just as it has been adopted by some denominations and sects within Christianity and Judaism in that part of the world. But in every case FGM was in place before the various religious groups adopted it.

In fact, female genital mutilation actually precedes all the major world faiths and is also found in communities with animist or pantheistic beliefs. Despite claims to the contrary, FGM is fundamental to no global religion, even though at various times and in various places various faiths have adopted the practice.    

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 4: Men, Women and Power

In the twentieth century female genital mutilation was a matter rarely discussed in polite Western society. Its immutable centrality in various traditional communities, even nations, was barely acknowledged in the more modern ‘developed’ world, where the very large majority of people had no idea that FGM is a fact of life for others, even sometimes a few others amongst their own compatriots.

The onset of the twenty-first century, however, has seen things change. FGM has started to be recognised as an issue in most cities in the Western world. People in Britain, mainland Europe, North America and, for instance, Australia have begun to ask how it is that such a bewildering and disturbing ‘custom’ can have become a feature of their own communities and society.

Two factors in particular stand out as partial answers to this question.  

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 5: Clinical Issues

Female genital mutilation, especially in its more extensive forms, is permanently scarring both physically and mentally. Its impacts are lifelong and often severe.

Sometimes FGM is fatal. Its victims do not always become ‘survivors’ in any sense of the word.

Some girls or women who undergo mutilation die in the immediate and short-term aftermath of the abuse, and later on more will die as a result of difficulties in childbirth or because of long-term conditions including fistula. Babies born to women with FGM are also at risk and sometimes die because of the obstetric complications it can cause.

The United Nations, the World Health Organization and many other international and professional bodies1 are unanimous in asserting there is no positive benefit to FGM. They insist unequivocally that it must never be promoted or conducted as a medical procedure – which happens for instance in Kenya, Indonesia, Egypt and Malaysia, and which routinely puts the lives and well-being of those who undergo it at risk.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 6: Legislation and Governance

The UK Parliament has been sporadically concerned with female genital mutilation for almost a century, and British statute goes back three or more decades; but as of early 2015 there still has not been a single successful prosecution concerning any aspect of FGM. The circumstances which have produced this situation are complex, and, as the 2014 Report of the UK Parliament Home Affairs Select Committee1 (the ‘Vaz Report’) demonstrates, responsibility for upholding the law has frequently seemed to be regarded as someone else’s to resolve, whenever any public service professional is asked.

Thus we find ourselves in a position where the UK Parliament has pondered FGM for generations, but still some issues around legislation are unresolved. Frustration at the snail’s pace of effective legal positions has been shared by many, from way back in time – amongst those impatient with progress being Sophie Ramsay, great-great-niece of Katherine Atholl who co-chaired the first parliamentary committee, in 1929.

And the global legal community has also been overtly concerned about FGM since at least the end of the Second World War. The illegality of female genital mutilation is grounded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in formal international law and in the explicit legislation of many nations around the world, including the United Kingdom.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 7: Prevention: Formal Approaches

The available instruments of enforcement in eradicating female genital mutilation are both formal and informal. Whilst the prevention of FGM is self-evidently a matter for the legal authorities, this is by no means the only way in which upholding the law is – or should be – enforced.

Despite occasional attempts by some proponents of specific approaches to make the issue ‘either/or’, the effectiveness of any one prevention strategy is likely in the end to be enhanced (or just occasionally to be hampered) by the others.

The tools of enforcement include community engagement, education via schools, clinics and other public facilities, working with the transport and migration authorities, media programmes, briefing of professionals and ultimately the legal process itself.

Even all these strategies cannot, however, ensure prevention, especially when the fundamental meanings of FGM are still perceived differently by different elements of the practising communities, the preventative public and and voluntary services, and the general public.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 8: Prevention: Communities

Female genital mutilation is a complex business. It involves deeply entrenched beliefs, real and resolute social and economic forces, human agency of a particularly intimate nature, brutality and secrecy. It is also held by large numbers of those involved, and perhaps also by the recipient of the action, to be in the best interests of the person who experiences it.

These are not easy issues to unpick, and the path towards understanding and arresting the practice is further complicated by the gulf between the traditions and beliefs which engender and enable, even ennoble, FGM, and those which proclaim it without exception to be abhorrent abuse.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 9: Prevention: Information and Education

The most obvious opportunity to tackle FGM, alongside health and medical contexts, is in schools.  Almost every child attends school, whatever her or his background, and even in 2015 the Department for Education, and Ofsted (the Inspectorate) remain influential.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 10: Prevention: Social Services and Multi-agency Work

Progress is now (early 2015) being made, but the removal by the new Coalition Government in 2011 of the post of national coordinator of action to eradicate female genital mutilation was a serious blow to the UK programme.  As noted (Chapter 7) progress was interrupted for some while: whilst the post was fairly new, its potential value is indicated by the fact that, more than three years and much vigorous activist positioning and campaigning later, in 2014, a discussion of how to implement a meaningful national action plan again came again onto the agenda.

In the meantime, as recent studies have shown, the number of women and girls with, or at risk of, FGM in Britain has probably increased significantly.  It is impossible to know precisely how many individuals could have been spared FGM if the emerging 2011 national coordinator role had continued, but an estimate of this number would be instructive as part of a study of the impact of nationally integrated service provision or the converse.

Nonetheless, there is now understanding and acceptance across the UK public service sector that FGM is, and must be tackled as, gross child abuse.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 11: UK Politics and the Media

There are various participants in the journey to end female genital mutilation in the UK. Most, but certainly not all, would align with the declared, socially progressive assumptions of this text. All except the most radical apologist or traditionalist seek somehow to eradicate FGM. The commonality of aim but discrepancies of perspective do, however, come into sharp relief when issues of politics, media and culture are considered.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Chapter 12: Will FGM be Eradicated in the UK in a Decade?

How many more girls and young women in the UK (or the USA, or Australia, or in other Western states) will have their health, even lives, put at risk because of FGM?

How long will it be before Western political leaders recognise they must put their own house properly in order, as well as formulating FGM and those who practise it as ‘the other’?

And how long must we wait, with children at risk every day, before campaigners in communities and law enforcement authorities find ways to work together much more effectively? How are we to reach the crucial consensus, in traditionally practising communities and elsewhere, that FGM is everyone’s business, simply another grimly appalling act of cruelty permitting, of itself, no more ‘cultural sensitivity’ or special pleading by anyone involved than any other abuse of girls and women? 

These are stark questions, but they must be asked. Children in the UK remain at serious risk; lives continue to be ruined in Britain, across the Western world and around the globe. 

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Further Reading: Some Suggestions

Below are the Further Reading (book) suggestions already made in the book Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation, plus others as this list is updated.

For convenience and to avoid duplication, this page is being shared with the Female Mutilation Worldwide Further Reading page for my narrative ‘FGM stories’ book, Female Mutilation: The truth behind the horrifying global practice of female genital mutilation (New Holland Publishers, 2016).  Readers can visit (or return to) the Female Mutilation Worldwide website here.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Multi-media, Campaign and Education Resources

There is a growing list of multi-media resources to support #EndFGM campaigning. Here are a few of these resources already referenced in the book Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation.

For convenience and to avoid duplication, this page is being shared with the Female Mutilation Worldwide Campaign and Education Resources page for my narrative ‘FGM stories’ book, Female Mutilation: The truth behind the horrifying global practice of female genital mutilation (New Holland Publishers, 2016).  Readers can visit (or return to) the Female Mutilation Worldwide website here.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Organisations

This list in the book Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation is a by no means exhaustive list of organisations in various parts of the world which support the eradication of FGM.

For convenience and to avoid duplication, this page is being shared with the Female Mutilation Worldwide Organisations page for my narrative ‘FGM stories’ book, Female Mutilation: The truth behind the horrifying global practice of female genital mutilation (New Holland Publishers, 2016).  Readers can visit (or return to) the Female Mutilation Worldwide website here.

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Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation Appendix: A Feminist Statement on Female Genital Mutilation

 FEMINIST STATEMENT ON THE NAMING & ABOLITION OF FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION (2013)

Patriarchal oppression is the bedrock of female genital mutilation (FGM) and related harmful traditional practices.  

The aim of this Statement, now also published in in the book Eradicating Female Genital Mutilation, is to gather support, from concerned citizens and from people directly working to abolish FGM, for research, dialogue and activism which derives from such an understanding. To that end we insist, for instance, that FGM be correctly named – as specifically ‘mutilation’ and not, in formal discourse, by any evasive or softening euphemism.

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