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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.

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 traditional predictor of technical inefficiency proposed by Jondrow, Lovell, Materov, and Schmidt (1982) is a conditional expectation. This chapter explores whether, and by how much, the predictor can be improved by using auxiliary information in the conditioning set. It considers two types of stochastic frontier models. The first type is a panel data model where composed errors from past and future time periods contain information about contemporaneous technical inefficiency. The second type is when the stochastic frontier model is augmented by input ratio equations in which allocative inefficiency is correlated with technical inefficiency. Compared to the standard kernel-smoothing estimator, a newer estimator based on a local linear random forest helps mitigate the curse of dimensionality when the conditioning set is large. Besides numerous simulations, there is an illustrative empirical example.

There is a growing recognition that social norms play a key role in perpetuating gender- and age-based violence, and that tackling social norms must be an integral component of prevention and response interventions to ensure meaningful progress towards the ambitious targets of eliminating gender-based violence (Sustainable Development Goal [SDG] Target 5.2) and violence against children (SDG 16.2) by 2030. However, existing research often fails to adequately capture life-course and context-specific complexities. To explore these challenges, this chapter focuses on adolescents’ vulnerabilities to violence in Afar, one of the Ethiopia’s most disadvantaged regions. Drawing on findings from the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) mixed-methods 2018 baseline research, and using a socio-ecological framework, the chapter highlights that while the patterning of violence experienced by adolescent girls and boys is shifting across generations at the micro-level, gender- and age-related social norms remain deeply entrenched in both migrating and settled pastoralist communities. At the meso-level, institutional barriers to addressing adolescents’ experiences of violence include a lack of basic infrastructure, a dearth of confidential reporting spaces, limited adolescent- and gender-friendly personnel within the police and justice sectors, and poor coordination. At the macro-level, the chapter underscores the significant disconnect between Ethiopia’s progressive national policies and adolescents’ experiences of violence, reflected in the availability and quality of prevention and response services. The chapter concludes that to adequately tailor services to local realities and tackle adolescents’ specific vulnerabilities, a fine-grained analysis of the gendered and generational experiences of violence in its diverse forms is critical.

Drawing on ethnographic observations of diabetes (self-)management in French-speaking Switzerland and semi-structured interviews with healthcare practitioners, people living with diabetes and their relatives, the chapter aims at shedding light on self-tracking practices of people living with diabetes. It explores the ways people with diabetes measure and learn to recognise body symptoms of hypo- and hyperglycaemia through self-quantification, and act consequently. In particular, the chapter investigates recent medical devices – continuous and flash glucose monitoring systems – that reconfigure the work of health providers and self-care practices. It shows the self-monitoring practices and the resulting self-awareness people living with diabetes develop in interaction with technology and caregivers in order to undertake embodied actions. By pointing out that new technologies have facilitated the access to personal body information and the sharing of it, self-monitoring is also questioned as a form of surveillance, opening up issues of power and control over patients’ behaviours. With regard to this, the chapter illustrates that, occasionally, people with diabetes resist ‘docility’ through micro-powers at the level of everyday life by refusing to engage in their use and by developing personal strategies or ‘tactics’.