Female Genital Mutilation and Male Circumcision Should Both Be Abolished essays

Female Genital Mutilation and Male Circumcision Should Both Be Abolished essays There has been countless news reports and television programming discussing the horrors of female circumcision or female genital mutilation. However, there has been very little in the main stream press regarding the practice of male circumcision. Female genital mutilation is no more of a human rights violation than male circumcision , therefore both should be Although, genital mutilations are usually referred to as a cultural practice, there is increasing evidence that this innocent and benign label actually evades, dismisses and covers-up the horrific effects these mutilations have upon a child's psyche and soma, and, moreover present a very real danger to the child's health.[1] Thus, one wonders how such a practice ever began in the first place. People or cultures who engage in such practices view them as an essential right of passage and often an important requirement for a marriage partner, while those who do not practice genital circumcision view the practice with disbelief, horrified that any human would willingly permit such a thing to be performed on his or her child.[2] So, just where did these practices originate' According to history and archaeology, together with the "global distributions of male and female genital mutilations among native, non Western people, suggests their genesis in the deserts of Northeast Africa and the Near East, with subsequent diffusion outward into sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and possibly into part of the New World."[3] The practice migrated due to military conquest of cultures that did not mutilate by cultures that did, or by "voluntary adoption in association with other cultural changes of an anti-sexual and anti-child nature," similar to such practices as "infant cranial deformation, swaddling, virginity taboo, vaginal blood taboo, and male domination of kinship and inheritance."[4] Incision, which is considered ...