Just a smidgin
I wrote my column for the Freethinker about a couple of ethicists who recommend “compromising” over FGM.
There’s much discussion on social media of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Kavita Shah Arora and Allan J Jacobs that urges ‘compromise’ on the issue of female genital mutilation (FGM). Just cut off a little bit of girls’ genitals, as opposed to shaving everything off and sewing the hole closed.
By the same token we could throw just a little bit of acid in women’s faces, and throw just a few stones at women accused of sex outside marriage, and rape just a few altar boys when no one is looking.
Riposte to faraway MaineBird, commenting on your article in Freethinker.co.uk :
Why should you have heard of Google?
How ’bout if your culture is inherently bad we just shun and destroy it? Evil culture should not be compromised on or tolerated, Western colonialism be damned.
Also, FGM is a regional culture thing, not required by Islam IIRC, so… where’s the problem here you failure ethicists?
Slowly but surely this practice will gain acceptance because people are gradually being conditioned to accept it as the new normal
Or if we find someone performing FGM we could shoot them a little bit in the head.
The only way I can see this being useful is if it is part of a concerted plan aimed at ending cultural support for FGM. One of the big problems with this kind of practice is to end the actual cultural desire for it and a big problem we have with that is that in some areas protesting the practice is seen as a “Western” thing. Now, OK, that doesn’t matter if you think you can legislate the practice away – but that is rarely effective in practice, particularly in countries where policing is negligent, sparse and, most importantly, coming from the same cultural milieu as the people performing the mutilation. A law is only as good as its enforcement.
The way to end any dreadful cultural practice is education, preferably originating from within the cultural milieu the practice exists in, and a “weaning off” the practice. In this case this may mean starting by banning the most extreme forms while still fully intending to reduce the practice further. It’s exactly this tactic that has, alas, drastically reduced abortion access in the US. It’s a political game: don’t ask for what you want, campaign for what you can get and when that is achieved, move the goalposts. Never admit the end goal, just focus on that small reduction that can’t really be objected to by a reasonable person.
In the case of FGM that means being led by local groups, letting them set the agenda and the pace for change because then you will get what you want: in this case the eradication of what is an horrendous practice – and the culture itself will do the policing.
Another example is the way Empress CiXi ended the cultural practice of foot binding in China.