Strategic Priority: TB's Scientific Committee, & bringing down the medical domino & the WHO
Michael Winnel
Concluding commentary: a dilemma without viable solution
In a perfect world, it would be possible to resolve controversy through solid scientific research: How harmful is circumcision of girls, and to what extent is it reasonable to talk about harm involved when young boys are circumcised? ‘Science’ gives very inconclusive answers, and the compiled research about FC and MC displays contradictions rather than conclusions.
Some social science studies are especially interesting in this respect: researchers who critically study the production of scientific knowledge and who demonstrate how such knowledge production is embedded in wider structures influencing the presentation of the results. Regarding research – initiated by WHO – on medical (obstetric) consequences of female circumcision, American anthropologist Saida Hodžić (2013) ‘trace[d] the social and governmental lives of fact and meaning-making’ in an ethnographic study focusing on the question: ‘how did WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about female genital cutting end up legitimizing them?’ (2013:86). Quite similar in scope is another study (Giami, et al. 2015, see also de Camargo, et al. 2013) discussing the knowledge production at the 2007 WHO technical consultation on MC and HIV, which ended in the WHO recommendation of male circumcision as a tool to prevent the spread of HIV. They assert that ‘[t]his kind of conference is not a site for the production of scientific knowledge, but rather a place where scientific results are used in order to justify and legitimate the implementation of evidence-based public health policy’ (2015:590). They discuss what kind of scientific knowledge was mobilised, and contends that the framework of the technical consultation discussions was rather narrow.
As many scholars have argued (among them, Earp 2017), the controversy over circumcision of boys cannot be solved by scientific data. It is an issue that has to be argued out by society’s stakeholders, weighing various values against each other. One way to boil down the arguments from both sides is to say that the tensions mainly involve two camps: one cherishing pluralistic values, stating that liberal, democratic, pluralistic societies must be able to harbour a variety of cultural and religious practices (e.g., Levey 2013, Shweder 2000, 2005, 2013, Yurdakul 2016, Zakir 2016), and another, arguing from a children’s rights perspective, privileging the child’s right to bodily integrity (e.g., Darby 2016, Darby & Svoboda 2007, Earp 2014, 2015c, 2017, Frisch, et al. 2013).
This is however not only a matter of values – but also a matter of what is politically feasible. Most scholars would agree that, on strictly anatomical grounds, the removal of the foreskin in boys (legal) is a more extensive procedure than pricking of the genitals in girls (illegal).15 Decades of activism to eradicate ‘FGM’, striving to make all forms of it criminal, was politically doable. To introduce a corresponding legislation outlawing circumcision of boys is not feasible in relation to Muslim and Jewish minority groups in Europe. And as long as a majority of US boys are being circumcised, and the practice is cherished by WHO, there is no prospect of success for anti-MC advocates in Europe.
Another path to obtain gender equality would be to decriminalise milder – in the sense ‘non-harming’16 – forms of circumcision in girls (this alternative is discussed, explicitly or implicitly, by, e.g., APA 2010, Arora & Jacobs 2016, Gele, et al. 2013, Rogers 2016, Shweder 2000, 2013, Zakir 2016). However, every time such a suggestion has popped up, it has been fiercely fought down by anti-FGM advocates (Johnsdotter & Essén 2010). There is a pending FGM case in the US, in which a Michigan doctor with a background in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim group has performed some kind of milder FC procedure (nicking or scraping the genitals according to media reports) in two 7-year-old-girls from the same ethnic group.17 This case is of particular interest for the discourses in Europe as well as on the global level. The defence will focus on the issue of religious rights18 and, likely, display the parallel to circumcision of boys and what is legally accepted under the umbrella of religious freedom in the US.
(It has been pointed out by Darby and Svoboda that ‘we now find the WHO conducting two quite separate research projects: one to find evidence for the harm of [female circumcision], another to find evidence for the benefits of [male circumcision]’. For a compelling discussion about how this situation has played out in Italy, see Fusaschi 2015).
Sooner or later, European societies need to respond to the following questions, which, in reality, are one and the same question formulated from different perspectives:
- Why should girls not enjoy the same opportunities as boys to be incorporated into cultural
and religious communities through a ritual involving minor cutting of their genitals?
- Why should boys not have the same legal protection as girls against non-medically
motivated alterations of their genitals?