Genital mutilation as an expression of power structures: ending FGM through education, empowerment of women and removal of taboos.

subjected to genital mutilation, and their ranks are swelled by a further 3 million girls each year. Female genital mutilation (FGM) (the term in common usage internationally) is practised in 29 African countries and in Yemen, Oman and Indonesia; it has been imported to the industrialised countries by certain groups of immigrants from these countries. All forms of FGM are irreversible and cause various kinds of physical and mental harm and complications. German Development Cooperation (DC) has devised successful approaches to ending the practice of FGM. From an intra-cultural perspective, the focus of FGM is not primarily on surgical intervention or the manipulation of a girl’s or woman’s sexual organs but rather on raising the status of the woman/(future) wife or even on initiating her into a “powerful” secret society. Even when the cutting is experienced as traumatic, the practice is not rejected. Instead, the excised body is viewed as having achieved the aesthetic norm: the genitals in their natural state are denigrated as being unaesthetic, unclean or even as harmful to health. The status of eligibility for marriage (or for preparation for marriage) fills the girls with pride. Mothers, circumcisers and other, mostly elder women, enjoy their power: their skills with the ritual are in demand, their knowledge of how to raise the young is respected. They know the significance of virginity and the power of sexuality, which needs to be checked. Or they are bowing to the necessity of excising from the bodies of their daughters the – from their point of view – dangerous “maleness” to be found there. Several ethnic groups are convinced of the threatening nature of the clitoris as a male characteristic within the female body. They believe, for instance, that during birth the baby will die if it touches the mother’s clitoris. Thus the circumcisers are proud to do their (religious) duty and join in the process of increasing the girls’ eligibility for marriage (and raising the bride price). The pain involved in rites of passage makes the shared memory the more profound, lends the process significance, gives the girls a sense of identity and engenders a life-long feeling of solidarity among a particular age group. The rite of excision is not considered damaging to health: subsequent health problems are attributed to other causes. It is the will of the gods. The community is loud in its praise. Girls, mothers, fathers and everyone else are conforming to what is right and proper. COMMENTARIES