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This study delves into the factors that influence the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa, as well as the health implications. An online cross-sectional study was conducted with the use of electronic questionnaire. The study was targeted at adult females who were between the age of 18 and 50 years old. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the electronic questionnaire was administered on social media platforms (Facebook and WhatsApp) only through convenience and snowball sampling techniques. A sample size of 3,119 adult females participated in the study. Spearman rank correlation (r) was employed to test the hypotheses. Responses were gathered from adult females whom originates from nine West African countries which are Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Liberia, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia and Guinea. The study found a strong and positive relationship between culture and the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa, and there was a weak and positive relationship between religion and education, and the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa. Despite the health risks, it was revealed that female genital mutilation remained uninterrupted in West Africa. The findings of this study imply that the culture of the people, religious belief system and education are critical factors in efforts to be considered when discouraging the practice of female genital mutilation. Therefore, for healthy living, the practice of female genital mutilation should be discouraged in the study area. Based on the study outcome, recommendations were suggested.

Ritual female genital practices, widespread throughout Africa, are essential to gender identification and often are a pre-requisite for marriage. More severe forms of the practice, which are common in parts of Northeastern Africa, are also believed to enhance a woman’s childbearing capacity. Here, we critically review the gender- and class-based theories that explain the origins and persistence of female genital practices and the factors that precipitate social change. We also critically review evidence of the association of certain forms of the practice with various health, demographic, and social consequences. Our review exposes several methodological limitations of existing research that preclude population-based inferences about the medical and social implications of these practices and suggest that existing policies targeting such practices draw more on concerns over human rights than on scientific evidence about their sequelae. This review nevertheless exposes a potential contradiction between local justifications for and consequences of certain forms of the practice. Namely, despite an intended function of female genital practices to enhance a woman’s marital capital, certain forms may ironically lead to marital instability and dissolution through their negative effects on the health and reproductive capacity of women. We conclude with recommendations for research to examine the salience and implications of this potential paradox for women in Northeastern Africa.

This chapter discusses adjudication, expertise, and cultural difference as it appears in criminal court cases concerning female genital cutting (FGM) in the EU, as reported in a 2015 comparative overview. It begins with the distinction between typical and atypical FGM cases; a distinction that connects court cases to the cultural realities of the practicing communities, suggesting that the lack of cultural knowledge can cause unnecessary suffering to families and/or individuals who wrongly undergo prosecution in alleged FGM cases. A contrario, the intervention of experts in FGM court cases could be a positive approach to assessing the legitimacy of public intervention in certain cases.

Since female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) entered the wider Western consciousness in the 1970s, feminist debates surrounding these practices have wrestled with the tensions between recognising the specificity of women's experiences of oppression and challenging gender-based violence (GBV) as a global phenomenon. Crucially, although intersectionality is now readily applied to analyses of different forms of GBV, the international anti-FGM/C discourse has been slow in embracing more nuanced analyses of women's vulnerability. This chapter draws from still often-overlooked Black and postcolonial feminist thinking to problematise the radical feminist legacy which continues to prescribe the dominant explanations to women's participation in FGM/C in terms of ‘Third World’ un-educatedness and lack of feminist consciousness. In framing women's participation as a patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti, 1988), this chapter argues that women's complicity in FGM/C takes place amidst complex constraints which inhibit women's spaces for action in FGM/C-practising societies. The chapter reflects findings from qualitative research which has interrogated women's experiences of continuums of interpersonal and structural violence to make sense of women's participation and constrained resistance in FGM/C-practising contexts. In doing so, this chapter problematises the gender and racial binaries which continue to influence decontextualised understandings of women's acts of ‘honour’-based violence.

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.²

Support for child rights is widespread, and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified treaty ever. Surprisingly, however, we find that child rights discourse is not integrated as a core element of mobilization around either the eradication of female genital cutting practices or the provision of free primary education. Analyzing history and the content of child rights claims related to these issues, we unpack this puzzle. In the process, we illuminate the constraints on mobilizing strategies in general and some difficulties inherent in using child rights discourse in particular.

Although this chapter situates all violence against women as a human rights issue, it emphasises ‘culturalised’ forms of this violence, such as honour-based violence/abuse, forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The authors draw upon their respective research to highlight how these forms of gendered violence have been subjected to a process of culturalisation. The chapter shows that while this process has raised awareness of previously under-researched forms of abuse and highlighted some of the contextual differences between women’s experiences of violence more broadly, its overemphasis on culture and cultural pathology has resulted in policy and legislative responses that do not always benefit victims. Ultimately, this chapter aims to problematise ‘culturalised’ understandings of violence in diverse communities and to show how current policy, legislative and support responses fail to adequately address the intersectional needs of black and minority ethnic victims/survivors.¹

For decades, researchers studying female genital cutting have sought to understand why the practice continues amidst abundant evidence indicating that serious health consequences can result from the more aggressive forms of cutting. Behavioral ecology theory is applied to data collected among Ghana’s Kassena-Nankana to highlight the gendered cultural forces that keep FGC practice in place through successful reproductive outcomes. With its strong association to marriageability, and thus women’s status and access to resources through marriage, circumcision has long been obligatory. However, the social transformation that is currently underway in this rural population is bringing a new perspective to the value of education, which is replacing circumcision as the resource access currency.

All of these cases are evidence of violence committed against women, for the reason that they are women, i.e. because the status that society accords to their gender permits men (for the most part) to behave violently against women (for the most part). It is obvious that other groups of the population may be affected in a similar manner, but female victims of gender-based violence deserve special attention, not only because they represent the majority of victims, but also because, as opposed to children or the elderly, women can fight the violence both actively and effectively.² Gender-based violence is both of a physical and psychological nature and cuts through all cultures and societies. It is committed within the family (battering, sexual abuse of female children, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital circumcision, and other traditional practices that have proven to be harmful to women; non-spousal violence, and violence that accompanies various forms of female exploitation), in communities (sexual abuse, harassment, and intimidation in the workplace and educational institutions, trafficking in women, and forced prostitution), as well as in society at large (see Table 1).

In 2002 when we began reviewing papers for possible inclusion in Advances in Gender Research volume 7: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine: Key Themes, and Volume 8: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine: Reproduction and Sexuality, the popular press was full of headlines about Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) (for references and extended and detailed discussion by researchers and physicians see the editorial by Ronald C. Hamdy, MD, FRCP, FACP (2002) and the letters to the editor (Mikhail, 2003) in the Southern Journal of Medicine).