Colonial opposition in Kenya Protestant missionaries in
British East Africa (present-day Kenya) began campaigning against FGM in the early 20th century, when Dr.
John Arthur joined the
Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) in Kikuyu. An important ethnic marker, the practice was known by the
Kikuyu, the country's main ethnic group, as
irua for both girls and boys. It involved excision (Type II) for girls and removal of the foreskin for boys. Unexcised Kikuyu women (
irugu) were outcasts.
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". No proper Kikuyu man or woman would marry or have sexual relations with someone who was not circumcised, he wrote. A woman's responsibilities toward the tribe began with her initiation. Her age and place within tribal history were traced to that day, and the group of girls with whom she was cut was named according to current events, an
oral tradition that allowed the Kikuyu to track people and events going back hundreds of years.
(bottom left) was murdered in Kikuyu in 1930 after opposing FGM. Beginning with the CSM in 1925, several missionary churches declared that FGM was prohibited for African Christians; the CSM announced that Africans practising it would be excommunicated, which resulted in hundreds leaving or being expelled. In 1929 the Kenya Missionary Council began referring to FGM as the "sexual mutilation of women", and a person's stance toward the practice became a test of loyalty, either to the Christian churches or to the Kikuyu Central Association. The stand-off turned FGM into a focal point of the Kenyan independence movement; the 1929–1931 period is known in the country's historiography as the female circumcision controversy. When
Hulda Stumpf, an American missionary who opposed FGM in the girls' school she helped to run, was murdered in 1930,
Edward Grigg, the
governor of Kenya, told the British
Colonial Office that the killer had tried to circumcise her. There was some opposition from Kenyan women themselves. At the mission in Tumutumu,
Karatina, where
Marion Scott Stevenson worked, a group calling themselves
Ngo ya Tuiritu ("Shield of Young Girls"), the membership of which included Raheli Warigia (mother of
Gakaara wa Wanjaũ), wrote to the Local Native Council of South Nyeri on 25 December 1931: "[W]e of the Ngo ya Tuiritu heard that there are men who talk of female circumcision, and we get astonished because they (men) do not give birth and feel the pain and even some die and even others become infertile, and the main cause is circumcision. Because of that, the issue of circumcision should not be forced. People are caught like sheep; one should be allowed to cut her own way of either agreeing to be circumcised or not without being dictated on one's own body." Elsewhere, support for the practice from women was strong. In 1956 in Meru, eastern Kenya, when the council of male elders (the
Njuri Nchecke) announced a ban on FGM in 1956, thousands of girls cut each other's genitals with razor blades over the next three years as a symbol of defiance. The movement came to be known as
Ngaitana ("I will circumcise myself"), because to avoid naming their friends the girls said they had cut themselves. Historian Lynn Thomas described the episode as significant in the history of FGM because it made clear that its victims were also its perpetrators. FGM was eventually outlawed in Kenya in 2001, although the practice continued, reportedly driven by older women.
Growth of opposition One of the earliest campaigns against FGM began in Egypt in the 1920s, when the Egyptian Doctors' Society called for a ban. There was a parallel campaign in Sudan, run by religious leaders and British women. Infibulation was banned there in 1946, but the law was unpopular and barely enforced. Some states in Sudan banned FGM in 2008–2009, but , there was no national legislation. The Egyptian government banned infibulation in state-run hospitals in 1959, but allowed partial clitoridectomy if parents requested it. Egypt banned FGM entirely in 2008. In 1959, the UN asked the WHO to investigate FGM, but the latter responded that it was not a medical matter. Feminists took up the issue throughout the 1970s. The Egyptian physician and feminist
Nawal El Saadawi criticized FGM in her book
Women and Sex (1972); the book was banned in Egypt and El Saadawi lost her job as director-general of public health. She followed up with a chapter, "The Circumcision of Girls", in her book
The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1980), which described her own clitoridectomy when she was six years old: , Somali campaigner against FGM 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. Her article in
American Ethnologist called it "female genital mutilation", rather than female circumcision, and brought it to wider academic attention.
Edna Adan Ismail, who worked at the time for the Somalia Ministry of Health, discussed the health consequences of FGM in 1977 with the
Somali Women's Democratic Organization. Two years later
Fran Hosken, an Austrian-American feminist, published
The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (1979), the first to offer global figures. She estimated that 110,529,000 women in 20 African countries had experienced FGM. The figures were speculative but consistent with later surveys. Describing FGM as a "training ground for male violence", Hosken accused female practitioners of "participating in the destruction of their own kind". The language caused a rift between Western and African feminists; African women boycotted a session featuring Hosken during the
UN's Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen in July 1980. In 1979, the WHO held a seminar, "Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children", in Khartoum, Sudan, and in 1981, also in Khartoum, 150 academics and activists signed a pledge to fight FGM after a workshop held by the
Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women's Studies (BBSAWS), "Female Circumcision Mutilates and Endangers Women – Combat it!" Another BBSAWS workshop in 1984 invited the international community to write a joint statement for the United Nations. It recommended that the "goal of all African women" should be the eradication of FGM and that, to sever the link between FGM and religion, clitoridectomy should no longer be referred to as
sunna. The
Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children, founded in 1984 in Dakar, Senegal, called for an end to the practice, as did the UN's
World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. The conference listed FGM as a form of
violence against women, marking it as a human-rights violation, rather than a medical issue. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s governments in Africa and the Middle East passed legislation banning or restricting FGM. In 2003 the
African Union ratified the
Maputo Protocol on the rights of women, which supported the elimination of FGM. By 2015 laws restricting FGM had been passed in at least 23 of the 27 African countries in which it is concentrated, although several fell short of a ban. , UNICEF reported that "in most countries in Africa and the Middle East with representative data on attitudes (23 out of 30), the majority of girls and women think the practice should end", and that "even among communities that practice FGM, there is substantial opposition to its continuation". 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. In 2005 the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence published its first report on FGM. In 2008 several UN bodies recognized FGM as a human-rights violation, and in 2010 the UN called upon healthcare providers to stop carrying out the procedures, including reinfibulation after childbirth and symbolic nicking.
Non-practising countries Overview Immigration spread the practice to Australia,
New Zealand, Europe, and North America, all of which outlawed it entirely or restricted it to consenting adults. Sweden outlawed FGM in 1982 with the
Act Prohibiting the Genital Mutilation of Women, the first Western country to do so. Several former colonial powers, including Belgium, Britain, France, and the Netherlands, introduced new laws or made clear that it was covered by existing legislation. , legislation banning FGM had been passed in 33 countries outside Africa and the Middle East. A Nigerian woman successfully contested deportation in March 1994, asking for "cultural asylum" on the grounds that her young daughters (who were American citizens) might be cut if she took them to Nigeria, and in 1996
Fauziya Kasinga from
Togo became the first to be officially granted asylum to escape FGM. In 1996 the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act made it illegal to perform FGM on minors for non-medical reasons, and in 2013 the Transport for Female Genital Mutilation Act prohibited transporting a minor out of the country for the purpose of FGM. A federal judge ruled in 2018 that the 1996 Act was unconstitutional, arguing that FGM is a "local criminal activity" that should be regulated by states. Twenty-four states had legislation banning FGM as of 2016, The
American Academy of Pediatrics opposes all forms of the practice, including pricking the clitoral skin. Canada recognized FGM as a form of persecution in July 1994, when it granted refugee status to Khadra Hassan Farah, who had fled Somalia to avoid her daughter being cut. In 1997 section 268 of its
Criminal Code was amended to ban FGM, except where "the person is at least eighteen years of age and there is no resulting bodily harm".
Europe According to the European Parliament, 500,000 women in Europe had undergone FGM . In France up to 30,000 women were thought to have experienced it as of 1995. According to Colette Gallard, a family-planning counsellor, when FGM was first encountered in France, the reaction was that Westerners ought not to intervene. It took the deaths of two girls in 1982, one of them three months old, for that attitude to change. The practice is outlawed by several provisions of France's penal code that address bodily harm causing permanent mutilation or torture. The first civil suit was in 1982, and the first criminal prosecution in 1993. By 2014 over 100 parents and two practitioners had been prosecuted in over 40 criminal cases. Performing FGM on children or adults was outlawed under the
Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985. This was replaced by the
Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 and
Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Act 2005, which added a prohibition on arranging FGM outside the country for British citizens or permanent residents. The United Nations
Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) asked the government in July 2013 to "ensure the full implementation of its legislation on FGM". The first charges in England and Wales were brought in 2014 against a physician and another man; the physician had stitched an infibulated woman after opening her for childbirth. Both men were acquitted in 2015. The first successful conviction was that of a Ugandan mother, who was found guilty at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales on 1 February 2019. On 8 March 2019, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The second successful conviction was another mother, 39-year-old Amina Noor, a Kenyan woman living in
Harrow,
North London, who had taken her (then) 3-year-old daughter to Kenya for mutilation in 2006, when the mother was aged 22. As of February 2024, she was sentenced to 7 years in prison. She was the first convicted person to have taken someone abroad for the act; she had herself been subjected to Female Genital Mutilation when she was 6 years old. ==Criticism of opposition==