Comprehensive Study Notes on Female Genital Mutilation, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights

Case Study: Fauziya Kassindja and Legal Asylum Precedent

  • Legal Asylum Ruling (June 1997): The Board of Immigration Appeals of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) granted political asylum to Fauziya Kassindja, a nineteen-year-old woman from Togo who fled her country to escape female genital mutilation (FGM).
  • Family Background in Kpalime, Togo:
    • Parents: Fauziya is the daughter of Muhammed Kassindja, the wealthy owner of a small trucking business, and his wife, Hajia.
    • Father's Opposition: Muhammed opposed genital cutting after witnessing his sister's screams during the rite and her subsequent suffering from a severe tetanus infection.
    • Mother's Opposition: Hajia's family exempted her from the rite after her older sister died from an infection associated with genital cutting; consequently, Hajia also opposed the procedure for her children.
    • Tribal Context: Wealth allowed Muhammed to defy the traditional customs of his tribe, the Tchamba-Kunsuntu.
    • Education and Sisters: Fauziya was sent to a Ghanaian boarding school to learn English to assist in her father's business. Her four older sisters married men of their own choice with their genitals intact, making the family an anomaly in the region.
  • The Procedure in Togo:
    • Exciser's Testimony: Local genital exciser Rakia Idrissou stated that girls undergo cutting usually between the ages of four and seven.
    • Physical Restraint: If weak, girls are held down by four women. If stronger, five women are required: one sitting on the child's chest and one holding each arm and leg.
    • Risk of Injury: Girls must be kept still because sudden movement can cause the razor blade used in the surgery to cut too deep.
  • Sequence of Events Leading to Flight:
    • Father's Death: Muhammed died when Fauziya was fifteen years old.
    • Expulsion and Forced Marriage: Hostile relatives turned Hajia out of the house. An aunt took control of the household, ended Fauziya's education ("We don't want girls to go to school too much"), and the family patriarch arranged for Fauziya to become the fourth wife of an electrician who insisted she undergo FGM prior to marriage.
    • Escape: Hajia provided Fauziya with \\$3{,}000 out of her \\$3{,}500 inheritance (her sole sustenance). On her wedding day, Fauziya fled to Ghana (20,textmiles20\\,\\text{miles} away) by taxi with only the clothes on her back.
    • Transit and Newark Landing: Fauziya flew from Ghana to Germany, where helpers assisted her in obtaining a flight to Newark, New Jersey. Upon arrival, she admitted her documents were false and sought political asylum.
  • Legal Proceedings in the United States:
    • Immigration Detention: Fauziya was detained for weeks in an unsanitary immigration prison.
    • Legal Representation: Her mother contacted a nephew working as a janitor in the Washington area, who scraped together \\$500 to hire Ms. Miller Bashir, a law student at American University.
    • Initial Denial and Appeal: A Philadelphia immigration judge initially denied asylum. Activists, journalists, and law faculty at American University helped appeal the decision successfully.
    • Appellate Precedent: The appellate ruling established that FGM constitutes persecution, noting that women face physical violence, threats, or social ostracization for refusing the practice or trying to protect their children.

Medical Definitions, Classification, and Health Impacts

  • Terminology and Nomenclature:
    • Generic Standard: "Female Genital Mutilation" (FGM) is the generic medical term for all physical cutting procedures involving female genitalia.
    • Rejection of "Female Circumcision": International medical practitioners reject the term "female circumcision" because it creates a fallacious analogy to male circumcision, which generally has neutral or positive health and sexual effects.
    • Anatomical Disparity: The male equivalent of clitoridectomy would be the amputation of most of the penis. The male equivalent of infibulation would be the complete removal of the penis, its soft tissue roots, and part of the scrotal skin.
    • Scope: Medical and international agencies exclude purely symbolic procedures (which involve no tissue removal) from the rubric of FGM.
  • Three Primary Types of Genital Cutting:
    1. Clitoridectomy: Partial or total amputation of the clitoris; bleeding is stopped by pressure or stitches.
    2. Excision: Amputation of both the clitoris and the inner lips (labia minora). Bleeding is stopped by stitching, but the vagina is not covered.
    3. Infibulation: Amputation of the clitoris, removal of some or all labia minora, and incisions to the labia majora to create raw surfaces. These surfaces are stitched or held together until healing creates a hood of skin covering the urethra and most of the vagina.
  • Prevalence and Epidemiology:
    • Type Breakdown: Approximately 8585\\% of women undergoing FGM receive Type 1 (clitoridectomy) or Type 2 (excision). Infibulation accounts for 1515\\% overall, but represents 8080\\% to 9090\\% of all procedures in countries such as Sudan, Somalia, and Djibouti.
    • Global Volume: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates between 85,textmillion85\\,\\text{million} and 115,textmillion115\\,\\text{million} women worldwide have undergone FGM.
    • Country Percentages:
    • Somalia: 9898\\%
    • Mali: 9393\\%
    • Sudan: 8989\\%
    • Central African Republic: 4343\\%
    • Ivory Coast: 4343\\%
    • Togo: 1212\\%
    • Western Occurrence: FGM is also reported in Australia, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  • Health Complications:
    • Immediate: Infection, severe hemorrhage, and abscess formation at the surgical site.
    • Long-term Urinary and Reproductive Effects: Difficulties in urination and menstruation, urethral and bladder stones from recurrent infections, severe keloid/scar tissue formation, painful intercourse, and infertility.
    • Obstetric Complications: Obstructed labor and extensive tearing during childbirth.
    • Perception vs. Severity: Infibulation creates the most severe complications, but the false belief that clitoridectomy is "safe" leads to ignoring its significant medical risks.
  • Institutional Opposition:
    • Domestic & Religious Allies: In Egypt, Health Minister Ismail Sallem and the head of Al Azhar (Egypt's leading Islamic institution) support banning the practice.
    • International Bodies: Opposed by the World Health Organization (which urged health workers not to participate starting in 1982 and reiterated this in 1994), UN Commission on Human Rights, UNICEF, World Medical Association, Minority Rights Group International, and Amnesty International.

Ethical Relativism and Four Objections to Western Criticism

  • Cultural Relativist Position: General cultural relativism asserts that external criticism of another culture's practices is always invalid and that cultures can only be judged by internal norms.
  • Four Specific Anti-Criticism Arguments:
    1. Thesis 1: It is morally wrong to criticize another culture's practices unless one is equally critical of comparable practices in one's own culture.
    2. Thesis 2: It is morally wrong to criticize another culture's practices unless one's own culture has completely eradicated all comparable evils.
    3. Thesis 3: Female genital mutilation is morally equivalent to Western practices of dieting and body shaping.
    4. Thesis 4: FGM results in the loss of a capability (sexual pleasure) that is not central to the lives in question and to which Westerners attach disproportionate importance.

Analyzing Thesis 1 & 2: Self-Criticism and Local vs. Global Priorities

  • Evaluation of Thesis 1 (Requirement of Equal Self-Criticism):
    • Validity: The thesis provides a useful reminder against Western ethnocentrism.
    • Counter-Fact: American feminists actively critique Western cultural body standards, evidenced by major works like Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight.
    • Risk of Moral Narcissism: Excessive self-flagellation over domestic flaws while ignoring external human suffering constitutes a form of moral narcissism.
  • Evaluation of Thesis 2 (Requirement of Prior Domestic Eradication):
    • Logical Fallacy: Waiting to solve all internal problems before helping others abroad is morally false and parochial.
    • Historical Analogies:
    • Rejecting opposition to Apartheid in South Africa because racism persisted in the U.S. would have been morally unjustifiable.
    • Refusing to rescue Jewish victims during WWII because Western nations suffered from internal anti-Semitism would have been morally indefensible.
    • Moral Duty: Geographic distance (e.g., Togo vs. Idaho) does not reduce a person's status as a fellow human deserving of moral commitment.
  • Cross-Cultural Scope of FGM:
    • FGM is not tied to a single culture or religion. As late as the 1940s, U.S. and British physicians performed similar surgical procedures to treat female masturbation and lesbianism.
    • Nahid Toubia emphasizes that FGM concerns all human beings dedicated to equality and dignity, and must not be framed as an ethnic, regional, or religious divide.

Analyzing Thesis 3: Refuting the Equivalence Between Western Dieting and FGM

  • Eight Key Distinctions Between FGM and Western Dieting/Body Shaping:
    1. Physical Force vs. Social Choice:
    • FGM is enforced physically on young girls (ages four or five) who are forcibly held down by multiple adults.
    • Dieting is a matter of individual choice under social pressure. American mothers do not forcibly starve their young children to make them thin; mothers of anorexic girls are typically horrified by the disease.
    1. Irreversibility:
    • FGM irreversibly destroys biological tissue and functional capacity.
    • Dieting is physically reversible.
    1. Sanitary Conditions:
    • FGM is routinely performed in unsanitary and hazardous conditions.
    • Dieting does not involve exposure to unsterile surgical environments.
    1. Health Complications and Mortality:
    • FGM causes severe lifelong medical risks and direct fatal complications (in Togo, fatal hemorrhaging is rationalized by local folk wisdom as proof of a girl's non-virginity).
    • Dieting carries fatal risks only in extreme pathological cases (anorexia and bulimia), which remain medical anomalies.
    1. Age of Consent:
    • FGM is performed on children far too young to offer consent. Consent is explicitly ignored (e.g., an Ivory Coast father stated of his twelve-year-old daughter: "She has no choice. I decide. Her viewpoint is not important," a stance supported by his wife who personally opposes the operation).
    • Dieting predominantly involves adolescents and young adults who possess cognitive agency.
    1. Educational and Economic Agency Context:
    • FGM occurs in contexts of severe educational and economic subordination. Adult female literacy rates highlight the lack of autonomous options:
      • Togo: Female literacy is 32.9%32.9\% (52%52\% of the male rate).
      • Sudan: Female literacy is 30.6%30.6\% (56%56\% of the male rate).
      • Ivory Coast: Female literacy is 26.1%26.1\% (56%56\% of the male rate).
      • Burkina Faso: Female literacy is 8%8\% (29%29\% of the male rate).
      • United States: Adult literacy is 99%99\% for both sexes.
    • Powerlessness isolates women; for instance, the wife of the Kassindja patriarch admitted she opposed FGM and suffered through it herself, but surrendered her infant daughter to the procedure because she must obey her husband.
    1. Loss of Sexual Capability:
    • FGM irreversibly destroys orgasmic and sexual capability. Mariam Razak (a neighbor of the Kassindjas) was cut at age fifteen by five women; having experienced satisfying consensual sex prior to the surgery, she described the resulting permanent loss of sensation as equivalent to living with a terminal illness.
    1. Unambiguous Link to Male Domination:
    • FGM explicitly serves male control over female sexual behavior (e.g., Egyptian farmer Said Ibrahim questioned: "Am I supposed to stand around while my daughter chases men?" and seventeen-year-old Mohammed Ali remarked: "Banning it would make women wild like those in America").
    • Western media ideals of thinness carry complex, multi-faceted meanings (including fitness, athletic independence, and boyish non-maternity) alongside patriarchal pressures.
  • Asylum Precedent Comparison:
    • FGM provides valid legal grounds for political asylum, akin to Chinese footbinding (where foot bones were broken and flesh decayed).
    • Pressure to conform to media standards or high-heeled shoes does not justify political asylum.

Social, Religious, and Historical Justifications of FGM

  • Historical Origin:
    • Emerged in Africa as a functional substitute for female seclusion. Unlike in India or Pakistan, African women are central agricultural producers and cannot be secluded at home; genital cutting was instituted to regulate sexual purity outside the home.
  • Religious Claims:
    • FGM has no mandatory basis in Islamic law. The Hadith categorizes the practice as makrama (a nonessential action).
    • The Prophet Mohammed's cited statement discouraged deep surgical cutting in favor of minimal symbolic acts.
    • FGM is not practiced in major Islamic nations such as Pakistan, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Iraq.
  • Arguments of Moral Purity and Beauty:
    • Arguments that FGM prevents female promiscuity rely on degrading assumptions that women are inherently wild or lack self-control.
    • Arguments based on aesthetic standards must yield to evidence of health damage and functional impairment.
  • Economic and Status Factors of Excisers:
    • Initiation rites are often defended as essential for cultural continuity (e.g., Jomo Kenyatta's defense of gradualism over criminalization).
    • However, the practice is heavily sustained by the excisers themselves, who hold high social status as priestesses and derive substantial financial income from the procedures.

Analyzing Thesis 4: Sexual Capability, Celibacy, and Yael Tamir's Arguments

  • Tamir's Critique of Sexual Hedonism:
    • Philosopher Yael Tamir argues that Western anti-FGM activists overvalue female sexual pleasure, claiming that male interests are served when female pleasure is made a measure of male achievement.
    • Tamir compares FGM to religious vows of celibacy, stating that society does not condemn the Catholic Church for nuns taking vows of celibacy, and argues that traditional cultures offer motherhood in exchange for sexual pleasure.
  • Refutation of the Celibacy Analogy:
    • Capability vs. Function: There is a fundamental difference between choosing not to exercise an existing capacity (celibacy/fasting) and forcibly destroying the biological capacity itself (FGM/starvation).
    • Autonomy: Nuns voluntarily choose celibacy as adults. Children subjected to FGM have their physical capacity removed without consent before they are old enough to understand its value.
    • Informed Consent Deficit: Mothers who allow FGM cannot make an informed choice regarding the value of sexual pleasure due to illiteracy, isolation, lack of prior orgasmic experience, and systemic exposure to domestic violence and marital rape.
  • Refutation of Tamir's "Libidia" Thought Experiment:
    • Tamir presents a hypothetical society ("Libidia") where women with enlarged clitorises undergo removal to focus on other life goals, comparing FGM to a dental procedure or appendectomy.
    • Philosophical Contrast:
    • Platonic View (Phaedo): Body appetites distract from mental and intellectual life.
    • Aristotelian View: A person insensible to bodily pleasures is "far from being a human being."
    • Conclusion: Sexual capacity is a fundamental human capability. Just as society deplores procedures that intentionally blind or cripple people—even if blind or disabled individuals can lead fulfilling lives—society must reject the intentional destruction of sexual capability.

Internal Resistance, Reform Movements, and International Human Rights

  • Internal Cultural Shifts:
    • Resistance within practicing communities is widespread and growing.
    • The eighteen-year-old son of the Kassindja patriarch publicly stated his desire to marry an uncut woman after learning about the issue in high school.
    • The Kassindja patriarch modified his stance to advocate making the practice optional to prevent family runaways.
    • The average age of cutting in Togo has been reduced from twelve down to four specifically to prevent young girls from fleeing.
  • Institutional Challenges:
    • Suzanne Aho, director of Togo's Office for the Protection and Promotion of the Family, notes that attempts to counsel men on women's rights run into the heavy resistance of established custom.
  • Refuting the "Colonialism" Charge:
    • Traditionalists label internal opponents and external advocates as "colonialists" or "Westernizers" to undermine critique.
    • Opposing FGM is not colonial assimilation; it is supported by extensive internal resistance from local women, international human rights networks, and global health organizations.
    • International law increasingly recognizes that women's rights are human rights, and freedom from nonconsensual genital mutilation is a fundamental human right.