Please discuss your personal reactions to the readings and/or videos from Week 3 on Childhood and Adolescence, which focused on Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. Name
one new thing you learned from the course this week. Topical Discussion Questions on Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation to consider with your group.
1. Why is it important to study adolescent girls as a separate age group? What are issues that adolescent girls face that children (younger than 10) do not? What are issues that adolescent girls face that women (older than 24) do not?
2. What is the World Health Organization's definition of Female Genital Mutilation [FGM]? Consider the terms “female genital mutilation,” “female genital cutting,” and “female circumcision.” Given what you know about the differences in the procedures between countries, comment on these terminologies.
3. What are the justifications for FGM? What are the consequences of FGM? What is being done to change perceptions of FGM in the communities it is practiced? How would you address the cultural reasons for conducting the procedure?
4. Girls and women are more vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS than are boys and men. Why do females have a higher risk than males of contracting HIV? Think about biology, social status, and age differences.
5. How does the stigma around HIV/AIDS further endanger girls living with this disease?
6. Despite the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS, there are methods and resources to help symptoms and prevent its spread. Pretend that you are a young woman in a monogamous relationship with an HIV positive male. What are some ways to prevent you from contracting HIV? If you plan to have a baby, like Bhanu in From Outrage to Courage, how can you prevent your child from contracting HIV? How are communities helping girls and young women infected with HIV/AIDS?
one new thing you learned from the course this week. Topical Discussion Questions on Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation to consider with your group.
1. Why is it important to study adolescent girls as a separate age group? What are issues that adolescent girls face that children (younger than 10) do not? What are issues that adolescent girls face that women (older than 24) do not?
2. What is the World Health Organization's definition of Female Genital Mutilation [FGM]? Consider the terms “female genital mutilation,” “female genital cutting,” and “female circumcision.” Given what you know about the differences in the procedures between countries, comment on these terminologies.
3. What are the justifications for FGM? What are the consequences of FGM? What is being done to change perceptions of FGM in the communities it is practiced? How would you address the cultural reasons for conducting the procedure?
4. Girls and women are more vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS than are boys and men. Why do females have a higher risk than males of contracting HIV? Think about biology, social status, and age differences.
5. How does the stigma around HIV/AIDS further endanger girls living with this disease?
6. Despite the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS, there are methods and resources to help symptoms and prevent its spread. Pretend that you are a young woman in a monogamous relationship with an HIV positive male. What are some ways to prevent you from contracting HIV? If you plan to have a baby, like Bhanu in From Outrage to Courage, how can you prevent your child from contracting HIV? How are communities helping girls and young women infected with HIV/AIDS?
Women’s Health & Human Rights in Your Community
Dr. Gene Richardson talked about “structural violence”, which he calls “types of violence that are not physical but that affect the health of populations” including “institutionalized racism, gender inequality, lack of access to water or clean water, lack of access to adequate housing—all the sort of social mechanisms that prevent a population or a group of persons from becoming as healthy as they should be can be thought of as
structural violence.”
Please think about the community you live in. Are there any examples of “structural violence” in your community that prevent some members of the community from being as healthy as they could be? Please list out some of these examples.
List some of the reasons these conditions exist.
Are there any ways to address these problems? Does it require action from the government, organizations or individuals to help eliminate “structural violence” and promote health for all?
3) FGM is considered abhorrent by the vast majority of British citizens. There are, however, some immigrants (and potentially their children), who support the practice due to cultural traditions in their country of origin, which maintain that FGM is necessary to constrain the woman's sexuality and/or make the 'unattractive' female genatalia more aesthetically pleasing.
ReplyDeleteFGM was made illegal in 1985 but it is not until now that the first prosecution for this crime in the U.K. is taking place (the trial is due to take place in 3 weeks' time, against a doctor who performed FGM, whilst working at a London hospital). This is despite the fact that 66,000 women in the U.K. are thought to have been victims of this illegal practice and 140 cases have been referred to the police in the past 4 years alone. A further 21,000 girls in the U.K. are also thought to be currently at risk of FGM.
Clearly the British legal system's failure to enforce the law is unacceptable and dangerous to girls and young women at risk. The government therefore needs train law enforcement officials to be more aware of and sensitive to this practice so that they can take appropriate action, by implementing the law. Further, work needs to be done with communities that support FGM, in a sensitive way that does not stigmatise immigrants to the U.K., as well as with young girls, so that they are aware of the risks and health consequences, in order to challenge attitudes supportive of FGM. This is particularly important since, if the law is properly enforced, the greater risk is that the crime will be performed in unsanitary conditions by non-medical people, which could have enhanced health consequences, and that some people might temporarily go back to their country of origin, in order to have FGM carried out on their daughters there.
For further information about the case, please see: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-26681364
ReplyDeleteAnd for research about FGM in England and Wales, please see: http://www.forwarduk.org.uk/key-issues/fgm/research
1. Its important to study adolescent girls because they are in the age of marriage. The destiny of young women in some countries (Africa and Asia) instead of school is early marriage work at home, taking care of their children and husband.
ReplyDeleteThis girls don´t know how to defend themselves and they don´t have Institutional help. Many times they don´t know what is going to happen. They are submitted to violence as a surprise by, normally, older women. This ancestral practices does not have any type of justification even in religion. This is pure violence, torture against young women. And they can be manipulated to believe they are impure or they deserve less than men.
Only with education its possible to change the situation. As we can read in a report about FMG in Ethiopia "Adolescents who had low gender role perception were 1.4 times more likely to have a positive attitude towards the continuation of the FMG..." by AG Mariam and KW Michael. Education is fundamental to end this violence starting by giving education to women no matter their age.
3. Prevention to end this violence is based on education. NGOs can have an important role by working closely with women and their communities. Its possible also to include the fight against FMG in health programmes. Its clear the terrible consequences to women´s health and the death risks they are facing. Repression is also needed. A criminal and effective law that recognizes FMG as a severe crime (and prision penalties) against women its important as well.
I will reply to the following questions for the discussion:
ReplyDelete1.Why is it important to study adolescent girls as a separate age group? What are issues that adolescent girls face that children (younger than 10) do not? What are issues that adolescent girls face that women (older than 24) do not?
It’s important to study adolescent girls as a separate group because they face specific physical changes related to their reproductive and sexual health that children and adult women don’t face and that can have severe consequences for their lives. In addition to this, and as this stage is a transition to adulthood, starting to have an increase of responsibilities, adolescent girls start to configure their adult identities, what it means that these physical changes involve mental and emotional changes too. For instance, adolescent girls start to be sexually active (after the first menstruation), unlike children, and therefore have more risk of contracting STIs (HIV among them), to have injuries or problems in the reproductive system and of becoming pregnant. In the case of the adolescents that become pregnant, the risk of birth complications is twice higher for girls between ages fifteen and nineteen than for older women, what it makes as well a difference with adult women. Of course absence of education and lack of economic independence (unemployment, not recognized formal work) are factors that contribute to this specific vulnerability in adolescent girls.
2. What is the World Health Organization's definition of Female Genital Mutilation [FGM]? Consider the terms “female genital mutilation,” “female genital cutting,” and “female circumcision.” Given what you know about the differences in the procedures between countries, comment on these terminologies.
For the WHO FGM comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious, or other non-therapeutic reasons. Under this definition there are 4 categories, all of them considered a health risk and violation of human rights. Before doing this course I had always heard and used the term FGM, but now I like much more the meaning of Female Genital Cutting and I prefer to use it because it comes from the women themselves and their capacity of agency, who don’t want to see themselves as mutilated (=victims) and it involves more respect. Female circumcision I think is not a good term because it refers to just some specific kinds of FGC and in some way it compares and put at the same level FGC with male circumcision, diminishing the gender component of this practice and its gravity (in the case of men, circumcision is just the removal of a small part of the foreskin of the penis, without affecting men’s capacity to have sexual pleasure).
3. What are the justifications for FGM? What are the consequences of FGM? What is being done to change perceptions of FGM in the communities it is practiced? How would you address the cultural reasons for conducting the procedure?
ReplyDeleteThe main justifications for FGC are traditional and customary beliefs and practices, in some cases associated to religion (Islamic Religion), to exercice control over women’s sexuality (as women’s sexuality it’s seen as something dangerous that must be socially controlled) and social pressure from the family, the community or the government. The consequences are a lot, but mainly I would divide them in physical consequences (hemorrhages, urine retention problems, infections, infertility…) and psychological consequences (anxiety, depression, lack of desire…), that also have social implications.
It has been very good to see how women’s groups and human rights advocates have used education and awareness raising programs to change this kind of perceptions. I totally agree with Susana that health programs and training traditional health practitioners can be an excellent entry point to start to raise awareness about how not only women but also the whole community is affected by this practice. Although it’s a difficult issue, and it’s important to be aware of the cultural reasons for conducting this procedure, I don’t support the medicalization of the procedure (to continue applying it but with medical and hygienic conditions), because I think it’s still a violation of women’s rights. I prefer that the practice is abolished (and here, the legal frameworks and national laws play an important role, as Susana mentions), although this has to be done with the support of groups of the community who advocate and sensitize about it, instead of being an external imposition.