Every day, millions of women around the world live in fear. Whether at the hands of a stranger in a dark alleyway or by an intoxicated spouse, violence against women is a grim yet undeniable reality plaguing humanity as a whole. Luckily, however, increasing global awareness has led many to correctly recognize and start to address this urgent issue. The rise of legal reforms strengthening protections against domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender-based discrimination as well as educational efforts aimed to challenge chauvinist gender norms are creating pathways for a safer and more equal future. All these changes were possible due to the recognition that violence against women is inherently immoral. However, progress remains uneven, especially in communities where sexist traditions are deeply ingrained.
Culture is arguably one of the most beautiful as well as the defining aspects of humanity. It’s not just about cuisine, clothing, or religion—it is the product of hundreds of years of human experience and the legacy of our ancestors. While culture can enrich and bring societies together, it can often involve beliefs that are inherently discriminatory or oppressive, some more than others. One such example is female genital mutilation (FGM).
Female genital mutilation (FGM) refers to all non-medical procedures that partially or fully remove the external female genitalia. The practice offers no medical benefits and causes excessive bleeding, pain, and infections. Long-term health complications include lifelong trauma, problems with urinating, pain during intercourse, and increased risk of complications during childbirth, such as newborn deaths.
Practiced in 30 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, FGM is often performed on adolescent girls for cultural, social, or religious purposes, such as to preserve virginity or to prepare for marriage. As of February 2024, more than 230 million women have undergone FGM, and around 44,000 women die every year due to complications caused by this procedure.
Due to its violent nature, FGM is recognized as a severe violation of the rights of women as well as the basic human rights to life and to live without torture. FGM’s purpose to preserve a woman’s “purity” and suppress sexual autonomy reflects the oppressive yet lasting cultural belief that womens’ bodies should be controlled by patriarchal norms. As such, the cultural practice of FGM serves as an example of both physical as well as ideological violence against women.
Despite its severity, FGM is difficult to eliminate due to its status as a cultural and religious practice. For those born into these traditions, FGM is simply the norm in life. However, there are still both short-term and long-term solutions that can be used to tackle this harmful practice. First, it must be understood that most surface-level harms of FGM are caused by unsanitary settings and conditions of the practice.
This lack of proper medical supervision and equipment leads to excessive pain and increases the risk of death during the procedure. As such, medicalizing FGM in active practicing regions may allow the procedure to be performed in sanitary, controlled settings by the hands of trained, skilled medical practitioners— reducing the pain of the procedure itself and alleviating long-term harms such as by preventing infections.
Nevertheless, it is essential to remember that medicalizing FGM is not a long-term solution, for the violent social message of female oppression remains, as well as most health complications. Medicalized FGM is merely a short-term bandage used to protect subjected women from suffering excessively. A long-term cure to eliminate FGM would include efforts to educate individuals and spread awareness regarding the dangers of FGM.
The reality of the awareness campaign is that the message rarely reaches its audience in need; radical traditionalist communities often do not allow their members to be exposed to external messages of cultural criticism—this is what makes them so traditionalist in the first place. Moreover, the older generations will likely reject external messages due to their highly conservative and traditional beliefs. Therefore, a truly effective information-based movement for the issue of FGM would be to partner with local members of affected communities and to primarily target the younger generations.
This would be an approach similar to that of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which partnered with young local activists across the United States to effectively stand against racist police brutality, and to that of the Chipko movement, which focused on the efforts of Himalayan village locals to stand against industrial deforestation. By not only working with locals, who are more easily trusted by community members as opposed to foreigners, but by also targeting the younger generation, who are less bound by conservative norms, FGM can be eliminated in the long term.
FGM is a part of culture, but as an act of violence against women, it should still be promptly addressed. This is also the case for other examples where violence against women is a part of cultural practice, such as honor killings, a practice in which women are killed by their family members to preserve the family’s dignity, honor, or prestige. While tackling examples of violence against women in culture may be a daunting task due to the respect with which all cultures should be given, non-coercive and cooperative long-term approaches can help to eliminate the violence that women face in the name of cultural practice.
By: Taeyoung Ha
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