Factors Associated with Perceived Continuation of Females' Genital Mutilation among Women in Ethiopia

BACKGROUND Females genital mutilation is one of the harmful traditional practices affecting the health of women and children. It has a long-term physiological, sexual and psychological effect on women. Females' genital mutilation still remains to be a serious problem for large proportion of women in most sub-Saharan Africa countries including Ethiopia. The objective of the study was to identify the main factors contributing to the support for the continuation of female genital mutilations in Ethiopia. METHODS This study was conducted based on secondary data obtained from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey 2005. A two-stage stratified cluster sampling design was applied for selecting the sampling units. Both descriptive and binary logistic regression analyses were used to analyse the data using SPSS for Windows version 16. RESULTS The results on both descriptive and logistic regression model revealed that predictor variables like education, religion, residence, knowledge on ways of HIV transmission and region play significant role in determining the dependent variable. As a result, all predictor variables were strongly associated with the dependent variable. Regarding the fit of the model, support for the continuation of FGM, decreased with increase in education status. Furthermore, Muslim among other religions, and Somali and Afar among other regions, were more likely to support for the continuation of FGM. CONCLUSION There was low awareness with less education status, Somali and Afar regions, rural residence, and Muslim religion were predictors of continuation of females' genital mutilation.