Allowing "ritual nicking" of female genitals?

[Cairber]

The AAP has put out a new policy paper on Female Genital Cutting. The surprising section is the part where the AAP suggests that amending FGM laws to allow physicians to offer "ritual nicking" might bring down the number of girls subject to more severe forms of FGM.

Here is the full PDF of the statement:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/c ... 010-0187v1

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on newborn male circumcision expresses respect for parental decision-making and acknowledges the legitimacy of including cultural, religious, and ethnic traditions when making the choice of whether to surgically alter a male infant’s genitals. Of course, parental decision-making is not without limits, and pediatricians must always resist decisions that are likely to cause harm to children. Most forms of FGC are decidedly harmful, and pediatricians should decline to perform them, even in the absence of any legal constraints. However, the ritual nick suggested by some pediatricians is not physically harmful and is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting. There is reason to believe that offering such a compromise may build trust between hospitals and immigrant communities, save some girls from undergoing disfiguring and lifethreatening procedures in their native countries, and play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC. It might be more effective if federal and state laws enabled pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ritual nick as a possible compromise to avoid greater harm.

Efforts should be made to use all available educational and counseling resources to dissuade parents from seeking a ritual genital procedure for their daughter. For circumstances in which an infant, child, or adolescent seems to be at risk of FGC, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that its members educate and counsel the family about the detrimental health effects of FGC. Parents should be reminded that performing FGC is illegal and constitutes child abuse in the United States.

What do you think?

[Stark]

How could this possibly be sold to the backwards people that would perform FGM anyway? It's very obviously a different procedure and won't fulfill whatever fucked-up brutalising cultural niche that FGM does.

[Cairber]

I am reading through and the only evidence I have seen so far is that:

1. they say there is evidence that such policies may prolong FGM in a culture
2. there is evidence that making it completely illegal brings rates down more

maybe I am missing where they are providing any evidence in support of their proposed "compromise"?

[Stark]

It sounds like they're trying to have a better relationship rather than say 'no sorry you're a bunch of savages', which could be a good thing; it's unlikely this practice will change anytime soon so mitigating it is potentailly helpful.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Yeah, I guess if you can't outright ban such an abhorrent practice, you can at least settle for limiting it somewhat.

[Cairber]

Well, as of right now it IS outright banned by federal law. They are asking for that law to be changed so that "ritual nicking" can be performed.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Fuck that. It's one thing to bring in measures to limit stuff ongoing, it's another to backpedal.

[Broomstick]

People, try to calm down. I know the subject is horrifying but lets step back for a moment and look at this again.

The problem, as I understand it, is that because FGM of any sort on a minor is outlawed in the west families ship their girl children back to the "homeland" to have them butchered by some unwashed asshole with a rusty razorblade or broken bottle. So I guess the argument is that it's better to have a nick in sterile conditions than to risk subjecting a young girl to mutilation with a side order of tetanus.

I'd have to know more about this "nick" they're proposing.

I'd like to know what alternative people are proposing - forbidding families to travel abroad with underage girl children? Removing children from homes because the family comes from a nation with a high incidence of FGM before said family does anything wrong?

Keep in mind, too, that in many of these cultures saying "your traditional FGM makes it harder for your daughter to have children" carries a shitload more weight than saying "it's child abuse" - because, as incomprehensible as it is to us, to people from these cultures it is NOT child abuse and you're not going to undo a lifetime of conditioning with a 15 second finger-wag of disapproval. They value a woman's ability to produce children above a woman's comfort or health. They value a woman's virginity more than her health, in some cases even more than her life. It's basically proposing a bait-and-switch - let us use this "modern" version of female circumcision that won't mess up the kid's fertility, and in reality what's done is going to leave no more than a pinpoint scar, if that much.

So... if that saves some six year old from having her clitoris and labia entirely scraped off yeah, I can see that as the lesser of two evils. The problem, of course, is that you don't want to enshrine the "ritual nick" or in any way encourage it.

[someone_else]

Wikipedia has an article on FGM.

I more or less agree that letting a doctor do that is better than any other realistic solution.

And that outlawing it (or kieeping it outlawed) is more or less futile.

Educating them or the offspring to stop this madness should be the key.

[TimothyC]

I had to do a mini-essay for this for my sociology midterm.

What is interesting is that in eastern Africa, the rates of FGC are dropping. One thing I noted was that in Sudan (where my source* did her research), the practice is referred to as "Pharonic Cutting" while in Egypt it's called "Sudanese Cutting" implying that the practicioners are trying to distance themselves from the practice.

*Gruenbaum, Ellen
2009 Honorable Mutilation?: changing responses to female genital cutting in Sudan. In Anthropology and Public Health: bridging differences in culture and society, Robert A./Hahn and Marcia C. Inhorn, eds., pp. 397-21. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[Purple]

And that outlawing it (or kieeping it outlawed) is more or less futile.

Educating them or the offspring to stop this madness should be the key.

You know, I really don't want to sound like a trol but this sort of attitude is at the core of why things like that happen. Its also a wary slippery slope.
By starting like that, you can essentially say that outlawing anything is inherently futile because people are going to find ways around it.

What you should instead be saying is what measures do we need to take to ensure that people "obey the law". For example taking away the child, long jail terms or even the death penalty for parents that do this to their children.

Instead of making the legal system "softer" you should be making the system "harder".

[The Romulan Republic]

And that outlawing it (or kieeping it outlawed) is more or less futile.

Educating them or the offspring to stop this madness should be the key.

You know, I really don't want to sound like a trol but this sort of attitude is at the core of why things like that happen. Its also a wary slippery slope.
By starting like that, you can essentially say that outlawing anything is inherently futile because people are going to find ways around it.

What you should instead be saying is what measures do we need to take to ensure that people "obey the law". For example taking away the child, long jail terms or even the death penalty for parents that do this to their children.

Instead of making the legal system "softer" you should be making the system "harder".

As disgusting as this practice is, suggesting the death penalty for parents who carry it out is absurdly disproportionate. What possible justification can you make for the death penalty in such circumstances, or are you just being melodramatic?

[Purple]

... or are you just being melodramatic?

That.

[Cairber]

The AAP position paper gives evidence that outlawing/ outright banning has been successful; I believe they also give some European examples of this where Somalian immigrant communities have changed their ways because of outright banning. I haven't been able to read all the cited papers in full yet, but I am working on it.

[Broomstick]

There are times when medical practitioners made an exception to the rules, or deal with situations not anticipated by the law, or otherwise collide with ethics. Hospitals have ethics committees. Perhaps this is a situation where the law bans it, but there remains a mechanism for exceptions to prevent children being subjected to worse procedures elsewhere. Such exceptions would have to be reviewed by an ethics committee. This would prevent it being an easy option, yet may still be less arduous than taking the child out of the country.

I think the people proposing this option have the best of intentions - but, of course, the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

[loomer]

I could see some use for this in parts of the world where FGM is an incredibly common thing, but not in a nation that is somewhat civilized on that score like America is.

In fact, a fair few of the anti-FGM crowd down in those parts do essentially this. I recall one woman who would just give a light jab with a pin or a tight pinch with her nails, and since the girls didn't know what to expect, they believed it had been done and were thus quite happily in-line with the social beliefs without actual harm, which would erode said beliefs over the next few generations.

[Liberty]

My thoughts? Why are parents allowed to pierce baby girls' ears? Because really, there is no difference between a genital nick (just so it is a nick) and pierced ears. But really, this only makes sense if there is evidence that people who would otherwise have gone for the full genital mutilation will choose the nick instead. If all that's happening is that people who are currently doing nothing will start getting a nick, what's the point?

On a related topic, I recently had two interesting discussions on male circumcision. In the first, I helped a good friend of mine convince her husband not to have their son, due in August, circumcised. At the beginning of the conversation, he planned to have it done (largely because he wanted his son to be with his friends, and not to be made fun of), and at the end of the conversation he had decided not to. In the second conversation, I told my sister my thoughts about male circumcision, and she was slightly horrified. "But God told the Israelites in the Old Testament..." she said, and I replied that the New Testament says we don't have to follow all the Old Testament rules. Her response? "Look, I don't want to get into a fight over that." And that was that.

My point? It's interesting how ingrained male circumcision is in this country, among the religious (my sister) AND the not religious (my friend's husband). This is depressing. Of course, if male circumcision was made illegal (as female circumcision is in this country), that would probably change. Right? But then, we'd need to prove that there's a compelling reason for outlawing it. In practical terms, why is that so hard?

[Cairber]

Ingrained might not even cover it; I have met more than one woman who thought circumcision was required when their baby was born.

[Purple]

Well personally male circumcision is no less disgusting and horrible than female in my eyes.

But my point was that the current trend in euro-American justice systems seem to be: "Baning something won't help, might as well make it legal to reduce the damage."
And that is the equalent of handing out contraception pills to all women and legalizing rape.

[Broomstick]

Oh, please - don't tell me you're one of those asshats who has no concept of relative value, who sees the world entirely in binary black and white.

[Serafina]

Well personally male circumcision is no less disgusting and horrible than female in my eyes.

But my point was that the current trend in euro-American justice systems seem to be: "Baning something won't help, might as well make it legal to reduce the damage."
And that is the equalent of handing out contraception pills to all women and legalizing rape.

Yeah, sure, right...

The concept is that illegalizing some things can make them WORSE.
Like (consuming) drugs - drug-addicts are far less likely to go and look for help if they will be put in prison for it.

Here you have the choice between offering a legal alternative (not the same thing) or putting the children at additional risk since they will be butchered by amateurs with unclean instruments.

But hey, stick with your black&white-fallacies - they make life soo much easier

[Kanastrous]

Seems to me that if we can criminally prosecute a person for going abroad to molest little kids, we should be able to extend the same principle to prosecuting people for going abroad for the purpose of mutilating little kids. It won't help a child once the damage has been done, but it may offer some deterrence against others doing it.

I'm not sure about fully equating male with female circumcision, the way some apparently want to do. I'm a circumcised male, and while it was done without my permission I don't feel that I've been terribly damaged. Particularly when you consider that 'female circumcision' is commonly used to describe everything up to and including clitoridectomy - let's get real; having your foreskin removed is something else altogether. The male equivalent of clitoridectomy would seem to be having the whole head of your dick lopped off.

[Broomstick]

I've heard some people who want to call "Pharonic" FGM "female castration" to emphasize that it's more than a simple equivalent to removing a foreskin and more like removing an entire penis.

[Surlethe]

Okay, I split the tangent to the HoS. If anybody wants to keep discussing genital nicking, feel free.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oops. To the HOS thread!