When Robin Morgan and I wrote this article, we had already delayed it for several years. We were painfully aware that in the past, outside attention had often served to entrench this practice. Only after the World Health Organization finally provided regional forums where courageous women from the affected regions could speak out against the tradition did we publish this exposé in Ms. It was distributed by the United Nations International Children’s Fund. Some of the many women working against female genital mutilation in their own countries expressed relief that it placed FGM in a continuum of patriarchal practices that included Europe and the United States.
In 1980, “female circumcision” was included in UNICEF’s report on women and development, the World Health Organization made it a formal part of programs, and the World Conference for the UN Decade for Women met in Copenhagen and approved the four recommendations made by WHO that are listed above.
Some governments had already taken a stand, though with minimal results. The Sudan had outlawed infibulation in 1946, and Egypt passed laws against clitoridectomy in the 1970s. In 1982, President Daniel T. arap Moi of Kenya banned clitoridectomy after fourteen girls had died as a result of butchered excisions. In general, legislation without community efforts has often driven the practice underground. Nonetheless, national laws and international statements are important support for groups of women working against this practice, and also a guard against its spreading.
African and Middle Eastern families residing in Europe have made the practice an issue there by performing excisions themselves, or asking local surgeons to operate on their daughters. As a result, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have banned female genital mutilation by law, and there was a public debate in England and France when some surgeons were reported to be performing these operations for large fees. In 1982, French authorities arrested the father of a family from Mali who had excised the clitoris of his three-month-old daughter with a pocket knife. In 1992, a midwife from Mali was sentenced to eight years in a French prison for operating on three babies who later bled to death. In 1991, the first case of a woman asking for political asylum entered the French courts: Aminata Diop testified that she could not return to Mali without the probability of mutilation. (She was allowed to remain in France, though not to set a “precedent” for other cases.)
In 1993, Canada became the first country to include female genital mutilation among the potential grounds for seeking political asylum, and about two hundred women have been granted refugee status in the last two years. In the United States, there have been unconfirmed reports of adult women undergoing this practice as a sign of conversion to Islam, or as a tribute to cultural nationalism. There have also been documented cases of requests for political asylum for women fleeing it—for instance, the landmark case of Lydia Olularo who petitioned the U.S. Immigration Service to remain in Oregon because her two young daughters would be subject to mutilation if returned to Nigeria—but those cases were not allowed to set a precedent. Finally, in May of 1995, Doris Meissner, appointed by President Clinton to head the Immigration Service, announced new guidelines that would recognize female genital mutilation and other forms of gender-specific torture and violence as potential reasons for seeking refugee status.
Mainstream U.S. media coverage of female genital mutilation has only come about in the 1990s, and it is rarely a routine part of human rights discussions. Popular consciousness was increased by Alice Walker’s best-selling 1992 novel on the subject, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and also by Warrior Marks, a documentary film and a book of the same name that Walker co-created with filmmaker Pratibha Parmar. Earlier in Egypt, Nawal El Saadawi, a distinguished writer and activist, found her works banned, in part because she dared to tell her own story as a survivor of clitoridectomy. More recently, Efua Dorkenoo published Cutting the Rose, her eyewitness account as a nurse from Ghana and resident of London, who, though not herself a survivor, has devoted the last decade to organizing against this practice through FORWARD, an organization centered in London. She also organized mobile surgical and educational vans to reach infibulated women for whom birth would otherwise be a torture and a danger.
In 1990, the UN commission monitoring CEDAW (The UN Convention to Eliminate all forms of Discrimination Against Women) unanimously passed a recommendation condemning the practice as being deleterious to women, thus going beyond health concerns and implying a basic right to bodily integrity.
From secret “circumcision” to international visibility, from health danger to a crime against human rights, public awareness of female genital mutilation has come a long way in these sixteen years. Increased research has also uncovered a wider practice. In 1992, the U.S. Agency for International Development reported to members of the U.S. Congress that “over 100 million women and girls in at least 25 countries” were suffering the results of this crime that was finally admitted to be a “violation of human rights.” In 1979 when this essay was first published, the estimate was thirty million.
Somewhere right now, female infants and children are experiencing this torture and betrayal at the hands of people on whom they are totally dependent. Grown women are suffering from giving birth, making love, and the functions of daily life. By supporting the work of women in affected countries, by making sure this practice is never tolerated in our own, and by explaining the linkage between this and other patriarchal practices, we can help in the long process of eliminating this crime against female human beings.
—1995