Abstract
Abstract This article analyses the approach of key international actors to the circumcision of children, seeking, first, to understand why the policy towards the circumcision or genital cutting of girls is so different from that towards boys. As part of this project, the article considers the literature on the situation in international law, concluding that the legal position is unclear and debatable. The article notes, however, that the policy difference is justified not by key actors by reference to international law but instead by reference to their theoretical understanding of how dynamics of gender and power infuse the genital cutting of girls. The article suggests that this approach is deficient because it can only compute inter-gender harm and not intra-gender harm, with the consequence that it fails to protect boy children from harms, which a better crafted theoretical model of gender and sexuality would capture.
Highlights
This paper examines a perplexing question concerning the approach of key actors within the international community - the World Health Organisation (WHO), as found in a number of documents co-authored with various bodies of the United Nations (UN); and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), in a recent Recommendation issued jointly with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) - towards the circumcision of children
There is a long-standing, broad, and expanding body of academic and medical professional literature which argues that, if female genital mutilation’ (FGM) is seen as breaching the rights of the girl child, male genital mutilation’ (MGM) should be seen as breaching the rights of the boy child
One crucial difference between FGM and MGM in WHO discourse, and which helps explain the virtual absence of any consideration of MGM by the CRC, is that the former is regarded as the control or theft of the sexuality of girls and the women they will become, whereas MGM is not seen to have any implications for the sexuality of boys and the men they will become
Summary
This paper examines a perplexing question concerning the approach of key actors within the international community - the World Health Organisation (WHO), as found in a number of documents co-authored with various bodies of the United Nations (UN); and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), in a recent Recommendation issued jointly with the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) - towards the circumcision of children. In the fifth and sixth sections of the paper, I will consider the defensibility of the constructions of gender and sexuality respectively which underpin the discourse found in various documents produced by these key international actors, and seek to demonstrate the paucity of this discourse in terms of being able to identify clear and present breaches of the rights of the boy child
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