31 Facts About FGM

Typically carried out by a traditional circumciser using a blade, FGM is conducted from days after birth to puberty and beyond.

Until the 1980s, FGM was widely known in English as "female circumcision", implying an equivalence in severity with male circumcision.

In countries where FGM is common, the practice's many variants are reflected in dozens of terms, often alluding to purification.

Translation problems are compounded by the women's confusion over which type of FGM they experienced, or even whether they experienced it.

In those settings all types of FGM were found to pose an increased risk of death to the baby: 15 percent higher for Type I, 32 percent for Type II, and 55 percent for Type III.

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Several small studies have concluded that women with FGM develop anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The first publication to estimate FGM prevalence based on DHS data was written by Dara Carr of Macro International in 1997.

FGM is mostly found in what Gerry Mackie called an "intriguingly contiguous" zone in Africa—east to west from Somalia to Senegal, and north to south from Egypt to Tanzania.

Smaller studies or anecdotal reports suggest that various types of FGM are practised in various circumstances in Colombia, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, and India, but there are no representative data on the prevalence in these countries.

FGM is not invariably a rite of passage between childhood and adulthood but is often performed on much younger children.

In Iraq, for example, FGM is found mostly among the Kurds in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk, giving the country a national prevalence of eight percent.

FGM argued that surveys taken before and after this sharing of information would show very different levels of support for FGM.

Surveys have shown a widespread belief, particularly in Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, and Egypt, that FGM is a religious requirement.

In 2007 the Al-Azhar Supreme Council of Islamic Research in Cairo ruled that FGM had "no basis in core Islamic law or any of its partial provisions".

FGM is practised by animist groups, particularly in Guinea and Mali.

FGM, therefore "set to work to remove the clitoris whenever he had the opportunity of doing so", according to his obituary.

Jomo Kenyatta, general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association and later Kenya's first prime minister, wrote in 1938 that, for the Kikuyu, the institution of FGM was the "conditio sine qua non of the whole teaching of tribal law, religion and morality".

FGM was eventually outlawed in Kenya in 2001, although the practice continued, reportedly driven by older women.

One of the earliest campaigns against FGM began in Egypt in the 1920s, when the Egyptian Doctors' Society called for a ban.

FGM's followed up with a chapter, "The Circumcision of Girls", in her book The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, which described her own clitoridectomy when she was six years old:.

In 1975, Rose Oldfield Hayes, an American social scientist, became the first female academic to publish a detailed account of FGM, aided by her ability to discuss it directly with women in Sudan.

UNICEF began in 2003 to promote an evidence-based social norms approach, using ideas from game theory about how communities reach decisions about FGM, and building on the work of Gerry Mackie on the demise of footbinding in China.

The feminist theorist Obioma Nnaemeka, herself strongly opposed to FGM, argued in 2005 that renaming the practice female genital mutilation had introduced "a subtext of barbaric African and Muslim cultures and the West's relevance in purging [it]".

The 1996 Pulitzer-prize-winning photographs of a 16-year-old Kenyan girl experiencing FGM were published by 12 American newspapers, without her consent either to be photographed or to have the images published.

Nnaemeka argues that the crucial question, broader than FGM, is why the female body is subjected to so much "abuse and indignity", including in the West.

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Ronan Conroy of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland wrote in 2006 that cosmetic genital procedures were "driving the advance" of FGM by encouraging women to see natural variations as defects.

Against this, the medical anthropologist Carla Obermeyer argued in 1999 that FGM may be conducive to a subject's social well-being in the same way that rhinoplasty and male circumcision are.

Cosmetic procedures such as labiaplasty and clitoral hood reduction do fall within the WHO's definition of FGM, which aims to avoid loopholes, but the WHO notes that these elective practices are generally not regarded as FGM.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that a key concern with FGM is that it is mostly conducted on children using physical force.

FGM's argues further that the literacy of women in practising countries is generally poorer than in developed nations, which reduces their ability to make informed choices.

Several commentators maintain that children's rights are violated not only by FGM, but by the genital alteration of intersex children, who are born with anomalies that physicians choose to correct.