The skewed PC view of genital mutilation

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "There were several women involved," said Mariatou Koita, a young Frenchwoman of Malian descent who suffered genital mutilation in her own home in Paris 15 years ago, when she was eight. "Two forced me to lie down, one holding my legs apart and the other holding my arms above my head. A third, Hawa Greou, knelt between my knees and circumcised me. I screamed. I called out to my mother. She cried as she watched me."

But it was her own mother who had summoned the 'circumciser', in obedience to a custom that has led to the sexual mutilation of about 120 million women, primarily in the Muslim parts of Africa (though it is not a Muslim custom, being unknown in the Prophet's birthplace, Arabia). The belief is that uncircumcised girls will not find husbands -- and even in Western countries that have taken many immigrants from this area, the custom continues to flourish.

Mariatou Koita, however, grew up in France, where the practice was made illegal in 1984. When her mother called Hawa Greou in again in January, 1994 to 'circumcise' her little sister Miriam, Mariatou went to the police. It was too late to save her sister, but for the first time the police actually had a complaint from a victim.

From the address book the police confiscated when they arrested Greou, they identified 28 parents who had purchased her services. Now Greou is on trial for willful violence and the mutilation of minors, facing a 20-year prison term -- and all 28 parents are in the dock beside her, facing up to two years in jail.

The trial (before a female judge, of course) has transfixed France, and unleashed a fierce argument about both the propriety and the practicality of using the law to ban culturally entrenched customs. The controversy has grown so heated that large sections of the French media resemble an American university in the throes of a political correctness campaign. But 'cultural imperialism' is one thing; mutilating 2 million little girls each year is another.

A large number, perhaps even a majority of early human cultures engaged in self-mutilation, usually to strengthen tribal solidarity or for symbolic and ritual purposes, and some of these customs have survived into the present day. For example, cutting off the foreskin of young males is still practiced by all Jews and Muslims (and also, oddly, by most Christians in the United States).

But male circumcision has no functional purpose. It arose in the ancient agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia five or six thousand years ago, as a symbol of the shift to male hierarchies in the real world, and accordingly from the old fertility goddesses to newly powerful male deities in the spirit world.

While that transition was underway, there were many generations when the new male priesthood would cross-dress in female clothing to appropriate the old female magic. In the same way, circumcision was a symbolic male bleeding from the genitals to fertilize the earth, as female menstruation had previously been believed to do. But while male circumcision was only symbolic, 'female circumcision' has direct, practical goals.

The point of genital mutilation is to control women sexually. In its milder form, as practiced in Egypt (where 97 percent of women have been 'circumcised'), it involves cutting out the clitoris, with the aim of destroying women's ability to enjoy sex and thus, presumably, their interest in pre-or extra-marital sex.

Further south, in places like Sudan and Somalia (where the rate of female genital mutilation approaches 100 percent), a more radical procedure prevails. The operation -- usually performed without anaesthetics, and using razors or even broken glass as instruments -- excises almost all the external genitalia, after which the outer lips are sewn together leaving only a hole the circumference of a matchstick for urination and menstruation.

With this more radical form of mutilation, intercourse is often physically impossible without a further operation -- and the girl is guaranteed to be a virgin at marriage. In rural Africa, where most of the victims live, the immediate death toll from the operation is estimated at 10 percent (from haemhorrage, shock and infection), with another 25 percent of women dying in the long term from urinary and vaginal infections or complications during childbirth.

Over the past ten years, various UN agencies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Fund have begun to campaign against the practice. So have Western feminist groups, a number of governments in Africa -- Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea and Togo have banned the practice -- and some outspoken African women. But hardly ever does anybody face actual criminal proceedings for it.

France's initiative is being criticized for not recognizing the cultural dimension of the problem and for putting the parents on trial. "These parents were not conscious of mutilating their daughters," says Jean Chevais, lawyer for Hawa Greou. "If we want to fight (circumcision), we must use other means than the courts. Punishment is not as effective as education and prevention."

Perhaps, but how about punishment PLUS education and prevention? Cultural relativism be damned: no government is obliged to tolerate this sort of violence against its young citizens, however well-meaning those who commit it -- and the argument that punishment will merely drive the practice underground fails for two reasons.

One is that it is already underground. The other is that it can no longer be hidden if younger women like Mariatou Koita are willing to defy their parents to defend their sisters and denounce the practice. She has paid a high price -- in a community where family is the highest value, her parents no longer speak to her -- but she has done a very useful thing.

Window: With this more radical form of mutilation, intercourse is often physically impossible without a further operation -- and the girl is guaranteed to be a virgin at marriage.