Saturday, November 24, 2012

Legal Female Genital 'Mutilation'?

I wonder about this new trend of kids younger than 14 year old having designer vagina surgery. How much different it was with female genital mutilation practices in some countries, including Indonesia?

To my knowledge, the official stand of Indonesian Doctors Association is not to endorse FGM practices. That being said, I heard some doctors practice "FGM" in the notion to provide a 'better' care of the victims when the parents insist that their daughter must be submitted into FGM practices based on religious belief. In such case, the doctor didnt cut anything, only pricked the clitoris.

To my disgust, I was told that the traditional practitioners cut a little.

Now, reading that in the Europe kids, as young as 9 year old, go through surgical procedure citing due to some psychological reasoning is beyond me. Most of adults having the same procedure are because they compare their vagina to that of porn stars. I wonder if the internet helps creating such trend among young children, too.

I could understand the need of surgery if it was a congenital abnormality, but how many people out there having such problem?

What happens in Europe is a form of legal mutilation, because the underlaying reason of having such procedure is similar as in FGM countries: Someone (parents) wants that their daughter/ themselves conforming with certain idea that the small part of society holds about female genital that looks a certain way.

In FGM countries we could cite that people who do FGM are mostly coming from a low educated background. What can we say about their European/Western counterparts?


2 comments:

colson said...

What can we say?

Well, that if they are adults it is nuts ( maiming oneself in this way is pretty close to psychiatric patients cutting and injuring themselves- in my opinion), but at least they know or should know what they do.

However it is criminal if they encourage, or even if they just passively agree with, this kind of surgery if minors are involved.

TA said...

I knew I could count on you :)