The risk of female genital cutting in Europe: Comparing immigrant attitudes toward uncut girls with attitudes in a practicing country

Abstract

Worldwide, an estimated 200 million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought immigrants from countries where cutting is commonly practiced to countries where cutting is not traditionally practiced and may even be illegal. In countries receiving immigrants, governments and development agencies would like to know if girls with parents who immigrated from practicing countries are at risk of being cut. Risk assessments, for example, could help governments identify the need for programs promoting the abandonment of cutting among immigrants. Extrapolating from the prevalence and incidence rates in practicing countries, however, is generally not sufficient to guarantee a valid estimate of risk in immigrant populations. In particular, immigrants might differ from their counterparts in the country of origin in terms of attitudes toward female genital cutting. Attitudes can differ because migrants represent a special sample of people from the country of origin or because immigrants acculturate after arriving in a new country. To examine these possibilities, we used a fully anonymous, computerized task to elicit implicit attitudes toward female genital cutting among Sudanese immigrants living in Switzerland and Sudanese people in Sudan. Results show that Sudanese immigrants in Switzerland were significantly more positive about uncut girls than Sudanese in Sudan, and that selective migration out of Sudan likely contributed substantially to this difference. We conclude by suggesting how our method could potentially be coupled with recent efforts to refine extrapolation methods for estimating cutting risk among immigrant populations. More broadly, our results highlight the need to better understand how heterogeneous attitudes can affect the risk of cutting among immigrant communities and in countries of origin.

Transforming social norms to end FGM in the EU: an evaluation of the REPLACE Approach

“…Involves systems development, using a cyclical and iterative process. 8. Disseminates results to all partners and involves them in the wider dissemination of results.…”

“…It had become an identity marker. This contradictory evidence of the impact of migration on the practice of FGM could be explained by migration selection, including ethnicity and lineage, as well as education, poverty and urbanization levels [13] together with the intensity of acculturation [8] in different countries and by different FGM affected groups. It is a situation in flux and more research is needed.…”

“…Whilst FGM is a tradition that is dynamic and responsive, the elimination of FGM is proving difficult. Many researchers however, suggest that cultural variability and flux can used as resources for change with cultural practices being far more open to modification than perhaps first thought [2,7,8].…”

The Applicability of the Theory of Planned Behavior for Research and Care of Female Genital Cutting

“…In diaspora, some of these traditional values are changing. Several studies have found increasingly negative attitudes to infibulation (Gele et al, 2012;Johansen, 2017aJohansen, , 2019Johnsdotter & Essèn, 2016;Mestre i Mestre & Johnsdotter, 2019;Vogt, Efferson, & Fehr, 2017;Wahlberg, Johnsdotter, Selling, Källestål, & Essén 2017) and some acceptance of surgical deinfibulation (Tvenge & Andersen, 2017). Nevertheless, there remains substantial resistance to deinfibulation.…”

Meaning well while doing harm: compulsory genital examinations in Swedish African girls

“…A growing number of studies show that migration seems to be a key factor for change when it comes to attitudes and practices regarding circumcision of girls among Africans in Europe. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Some 200,000 people who were born in Africa live in Sweden. The biggest community is the Somalipersons born in Somalia amount to more than 66,000.…”