FGM in America

[GeoffP]

I'm of two minds about this at present. To the one, I acknowledge the sentiment that any mandatory female genital mutilation is savage. To the other, though, it's not just the lesser of all evils, but rather a long-term outlook.

If a tiny nick satisfies the cultural demand, the practice can have a long-term effect. The topic article notes that the ritual nick has made "some progress toward eradication or amelioration", and in the context of eradication, if this practice replaces full-blown mutilation, there will be many whose outlook is one of fence-sitting with some deference to cultural demand who will eventually view the nicking as pointless. Over the course of a couple generations, societies can make great progress toward eradication.

And this is a good thing. The problem is that FGM won't disappear overnight. While the hard line against the practice has merit, it isn't necessarily a practical approach. Hardline headbanging often results in nothing more than mutual headaches.

Certainly, in this long-term outlook, there will be some prejudice against those who have been fully mutilated, and this is problematic, but if full-blown FGM is culturally marginalized, yes, we can call that progress.
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Notes:

American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics. Policy Statement Ritual Genital Cutting of Female Minors. Pediatrics. April 26, 2010. Pediatrics.AAPpublications.org. July 21, 2010. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2010-0187v1.pdf

This is correct.

 

[iceaura]

How prevalent is this practice, is it just Muslims, what purpose does it serve, and what the hell does it actually have to do with Islam?

It is almost universal in some cultures, involving fairly large groups of people ( run across a claimed 90% of Egyptian women, but that's hard to believe) - most of them are Muslim, but not all.

It isn't "in" the Quran, thank God, or we would never be able to get rid of it. But it is easily compatible with the Quran and common Muslim attitudes toward women, and like other features of various Islamic cultures has become identified - by its practitioners - with their Islamic faith.

So you are confronting claimed religious belief, when you attempt to discourage it.