Female Genital Mutilation

In my capacity as founding director of RAINBO, ¹ have been concerned with the practice of female circumcision (FC) or female genital mutilation (FGM) for nearly 20 years. ² As a Sudanese woman, physician, activist, researcher and scholar – an unusual combination of roles – every aspect of my life has been closely involved in some way with one or other of the social orders which promote FC/FGM. I find myself constantly faced with the difficult choice of whether to continue focusing RAINBO’s limited energy and resources on the work of advancing the rights of African women to control their own bodies – including the right to freedom from genital cutting – or whether to respond to the barrage of enquiries from those in the West who are ‘interested’ in FGM. Most of the time, I choose the former. In this chapter, however, I will take the (rare) opportunity to pause and reflect on my experience of the latter, focusing on the way individuals and institutions – mainly in Europe and the USA – have behaved in relation to the practice of FGM. In doing so, I make no claim either to reflect an analysis of scientific data or to make a thorough review of published literature. I simply draw upon the accumulation of my personal and professional experiences as an African woman responding to Western interest in FGM.